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Do you have a source for this? I have never come across this debate and personally find the blackboard bold convention to be useful, as well as very visually el
by computerfriend 3y ago
Do you have a source for this? I have never come across this debate and personally find the blackboard bold convention to be useful, as well as very visually elegant.
- enriquto 3y agoIt seems to me that it is part of the folklore. Note: not the folklore of math! The folklore of mathematical typesetting, which is a tiny community. You can find many old and new math texts using either convention. Most often readers won't even notice. There are authors who are adamant against blackboard bold, most famously Donald Knuth and Jean-Pierre Serre. Others simply use regular boldface because of tradition, or because it's the default style of the journal. Most people don't care too much. But I have also heard people expressing strong opinions on each side, that's why I made the analogy with tabs-vs-spaces. Nothing too serious. Elegance is entirely subjective. I have the opposite opinion: if we can do real boldface in print, which is the original usage, what's the point of using a black-board version? We have the real thing! But I also understand the opposite opinion, voiced elsewhere in this thread, that open bold lettering is a new case, like italics or fraktur, and we can use it freely in print.