"Minus" symbol

[Petar Petrenko]

Hi,

 it would be nice to have "minus" symbol under "Text > Insert > Math".

[Seneca]

3 hours ago, Petar Petrenko said:

it would be nice to have "minus" symbol under "Text > Insert > Math"

Problem is that not all fonts have this analphabetic symbol. What is Publisher to do in this scenario? Ignore the command, substitute it for a hyphen? This is tricky.

[Petar Petrenko]

Even other math symbols offered in this menu are not supported by majority of the fonts.

[carl123]

Aren't the Minus, Plus and Equal keys ( - + = ) just standard keyboard keys?

I don't understand why they would be in Text > Insert > Maths or would inserting them that way do something different?

[GarryP]

This is a pretty good explanation of the differences between hyphens, minuses and dashes: https://jakubmarian.com/hyphen-minus-en-dash-and-em-dash-difference-and-usage-in-english/
As it says, most ‘minus signs’ on keyboards supply a hyphen rather than a minus sign. Most people aren’t bothered but some want to do things properly.

[U. Dinser]

Kind regards
Uli

[Petar Petrenko]

2 hours ago, carl123 said:

Aren't the Minus, Plus and Equal keys ( - + = ) just standard keyboard keys?

I don't understand why they would be in Text > Insert > Maths or would inserting them that way do something different?

Length of the minus symbol is equal to the length of the horizontal line of the + symbol.

[Fixx]

I think Insert>Math and Glyph Browser>Math Operators should have the same content. Now they do not. (Though I think Glyph Browser groups are based on some standard which defines plus, multiply and divide NOT math operators... go figure. I just want to add × and ≈ to my texts reliably.)

[walt.farrell]

2 hours ago, Fixx said:

Though I think Glyph Browser groups are based on some standard which defines plus, multiply and divide NOT math operators... go figure.

The Glyph Browser's layout is based on the Unicode standard and where Unicode places the characters.

Within Unicode, U+2212 MINUS SIGN is in the Mathematical Operators. On the other hand:

• U+002D HYPHEN-MINUS : hyphen or minus sign is in the Basic Latin code block
• U+00B1 PLUS-MINUS SIGN (±) is in the Latin-1 Supplement
• U+00D7 MULTIPLICATION SIGN is also in the Latin-1 Supplement, as is U+00F7 DIVISION SIGN (÷)
• U+002B PLUS SIGN (+) is in the Basic Latin code block

[fde101]

3 hours ago, Fixx said:

some standard which defines plus, multiply and divide NOT math operators... go figure

The original ASCII standard dates back to a time when some computers had a 7-bit byte size; it wasn't as "standardized" as the 8-bit bytes (octets) that are now ubiquitous.  This gave a range of 128 code points that could be used to contain the character set.  With a desire to have one code point map to one character, an entire set of basic characters was squeezed into these 128 positions.

With most computers eventually using 8-bit bytes (the mainframes that ran MULITCS used 9-bit bytes, but those aren't really around any more either), there were another 128 code points available.  People in different regions of the world would use different mappings for these "extra" 128 positions (128 - 255, or hexadecimal 0x80 - 0xFF), which became known as "code pages", while the first 128 (0 - 127, or hexadecimal 0x00 - 0x7F) would stick with the basic ASCII set for compatibility.  One of the most common code pages was the "Latin 1" set.

One of the problems with this arrangement was that with different people in different countries using different code sets, the same code would map to different characters for different people, so transferring files around the globe would be a bit of a mess.

To help resolve this (and other problems with that arrangement), the Unicode standard needed a lot more code points.  To maintain compatibility, the "Basic Latin" block of code points at 0x0000-0x007F maps exactly to the original ASCII character set.  This means that the basic characters (such as the +, -, * and / characters) are in that block, and the second block is mapped to the characters from the  "Latin-1" code set, again for compatibility with one of the more common arrangements.  Additional characters become code blocks beyond those first two.

Because of the history of how these code blocks were developed, they probably are not the most logical delineation for a user-facing glyph browser.