Re: [Tools-discuss] [Cellar] non-ascii characters (fwd) Dave Rice: [Cellar] non-ascii characters

[Henrik Levkowetz <[e-mail]>]

Hi Michael,

Here's my take on this:

A number of people has highlighted the desirability of using math symbols
in text.  However, this is not currently supported by xml2rfc v3, and will
make idnits unhappy.  Putting math in SVG is currently the supported
approach.

Several approaches to permitting math other than by providing SVG artwork
has been raised and discussed, and there may be ways forward for this once
the current focus on the v3 format transition is complete, but until we
reach completion on the transition effort, I don't think it's going to be
fruitful to push for this.

(Personally, I've felt sufficiently strongly about inline and display math
support to propose a number of possible approaches to the RFC Editor, but I
don't have time over to do any prototyping of any of the most promising
approaches until well after the xml2rfc v3 formatters are seen to be solid.)


Best regards,

	Henrik


On 2019-08-27 20:29, Michael Richardson wrote:
> 
> reposting to tools-discuss for comments.
> I suspect that the idnits tool may be in error in this case.
> 
> We are also using xml-v3 for ffv1, since it is full of math which gets
> rendered to SVG.  
> 
> From: Dave Rice <[e-mail]>
> Date: Tue, 27 Aug 2019 10:24:41 -0400
> To: Codec Encoding for LossLess Archiving and Realtime transmission
>  <[e-mail]>
> 
> Hi cellar,
> 
> I’m doing an idnits review on the latest ffv1 draft and am confused about the
> IETF rules for non-ascii characters in txt rfc drafts. The update at
> https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7997 <https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7997>
> seems to allow the RFC Editor to use some discretion in using non-ascii
> characters, but idnits <https://tools.ietf.org/tools/idnits/> still complains
> about that. One instance is using a Unicode minus sign to be more
> semantically clear than an ascii hyphen. Also since the Unicode minus sign
> uses more bytes than the ascii hyphen, idnits will say the line is too long,
> even though in appearance the line displays within the correct width. 
> 
> In the RFC for ffv1, we’ve used unicode symbols for floor and ceiling
> functions, such as ⌊a⌋ and ⌈a⌉, but rfc2xml transforms these into their
> hexadecimal expressions such as &#8970;a&#8971; and &#8968;a&#8969;. Any
> advice, should we listen to idnits and avoid non-ascii characters or listen
> to rfc7997 and use them when it makes the content more clear? 
> 
> Kind Regards,
> Dave Rice
> 
> 
> 
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