[XeTeX] Bold unit vectors

[Ross Moore]

Hi Tobias, Nicholas and others,

On 02/07/2011, at 12:22 AM, Tobias Schoel <liesdiedatei at googlemail.com> wrote:

> Yes, it seems as if Asana doesn't support \imath / U+0131 in Bold.

Because there is no need for it.
When the vectors (bold) i, j, k are defined to be the standard basis vectors, then they are already unit vectors. Putting a hat over them is quite superfluous. That there is no easy way to do this in Unicode is surely indicative that standard usage does not require it, so you should be discouraged from attempting to do so.

> 
> The \hat shouldn't be printed bold, as it wouldn't look good and the bold/regular difference wouldn't carry meaning.

And putting a non-bold hat over a special symbol that is already defined to be a unit vector would be quite redundant, adding no extra meaning.


> 
> Am 01.07.2011 14:22, schrieb Nicholas Oettle:
>> I'm trying to print bold unit vectors in Asana Math. I would like the 'i' to be bold, italic and with a hat on top.
>> 
>> It appears to be an issue with the \imath symbol, as shown in the minimal example below. In addition, I'm not sure whether the hat should be bold when used with the \mathbf command (I think it should be).
>> 
>> Perhaps a workaround would be to use non-unicode, non Asana with the AMS packages just for the unit vectors i, j and k, however I'm unsure how to 'undo' the unicode and Asana packages temporarily:

I would advise against trying to do so.
Use the symbols provided in Asana, with their correct Unicode code-points. 
Then as future software is developed that better handles both the appearance and meaning of mathematical symbols, your expressions from PDFs that you are generating now will be useful to convey the meaning and semantics of your mathematics, not just it's visual appearance.


>> 
>> $\boldsymbol{\hat{\imath}}$
>> 
>> Any help or workarounds would be appreciated!
>> 
>> Nicholas
>> 


Hope this helps,

     Ross