Typophile

less and greater symbols in text

Charles Ellertson

We are starting to see a significant number of bibliography entries of the form


You could argue that the “less” and “greater” characters really don’t belong, but when editorial says they do, that’s that; you set them. In most fonts, the less & greater glyphs may work OK with numbers, but look awful in text. It is easy enough to make up an alternative pair that work with such text.

BUT:

As best I can tell, there are no greater or less characters in the Mathematical Operators portion of Unicode (2200-22FF), or in the supplement (2A00-2AFF) — or anywhere else. All we have are U+003C and U+003E, so that rules out using the ASCII greater and less for text, and another pair for math.

Nor can I think of a contextual substitution that is foolproof. You could switch them to less.alt and greater.alt when preceded by or followed by an alpha character or punctuation, but there are cases where alphas are a part of an expression that should take the mathematical form.

My current notion is to put them in a stylistic set, but that means the typesetter will have to remember to switch it on for such citations, and that too has its perils.

Anybody have a better solution?

‹ Glyphname extension problems å showing up with “stroked” a ›
Michel Boyer

Maybe 27E8 and 27E9 from http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U27C0.pdf (called $\langle$ and $\rangle$ in LaTeX) ?

Tiffany Wardle

I’ve had to use the “greater than” and “less than” too. They stand out in many typefaces. I’m not sure these, Michel, stand out enough though.

Michel Boyer

Here is what it looks like in LaTeX with the package MinionPro

Charles Ellertson

These are angle brackets, now for mathematics — there is a text angle bracket now encoded in the 3XXX range. As such, they have to pair with parentheses, square brackets, curly braces, etc. — in both text and math.
I condidered them, but don’t think they are right, esp. as they have another, “proper” usage.

If there were mathematical greater & less codepoints, we could use the ASCII greater & less for text constructions, but I don’t think there are. Switching to an .alt seems the best solution to me (if ther is no math greater/less); the question is whether or not someone can think of a way of coding it to make it automatic.

But thanks . . .

Michel Boyer

Here is another trial, this time with XeTeX, the characters used are 2039 and 203A, Large, with explicit kerning. Maybe there is something to do with that? (Minion Pro again)

Charles Ellertson

Yes, I have used the left & right single guillemet a few times. They don’t always look good — the Minion looks OK — and of course, syntactically they are wrong. As long as I have to manually search & replace a manuscript, I might as well draw up what is needed. As you know, the .alt will drop out, leaving the “greater” & “less”, which seems to be the actual character.

The right answer, I think, is that these are not a part of the URL, but are in fact delimiters. What is needed is a better editorial solution. But that’s usually considered too deep a matter for a compositor . . .

BTW, your (their?) /slash /slash needs kerning, as does g/slash ;-)

Edit: If anyone cares, I can post what I came up with when I get into work tomorrow, it is switched by a stylistic set, though, and that’s not ideal . . .

Michel Boyer

BTW, your (their?) /slash /slash needs kerning, as does g/slash ;-)

I can’t say if it’s theirs or just that I was careless with some macro. This is what hyperref gave me with the \href macro, because when I

Captured from web.archive.org on 21 Aug 2008. view this capture