<story><title>Unicode Character “𝕏” (U+1D54F)</title><url>https://www.compart.com/en/unicode/U+1D54F</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>enriquto</author><text>&amp;gt; This is for math.&lt;p&gt;Heh.&lt;p&gt;The &amp;quot;tabs vs spaces&amp;quot; debate of mathematical typography is whether these symbols should be used at all in printing, or reserved for actual blackboards.
In LaTeX you can have actual boldface letters, so you should write a boldface letter R to represent the real numbers and so on.  Using &amp;quot;blackboard bold&amp;quot; in print looks terribly off to some (many?) people.</text></item><item><author>dietrichepp</author><text>This is for math.&lt;p&gt;In Latex, you get these symbols with \mathbb{}. They are most commonly used to represent to represent number sets, like the set of all integers Z (from the German), set of all natural numbers N, set of complex numbers C, set of all real numbers R, rationals Q (for “quotient”), set of quaternions H (named after Hamilton), or an unknown set F (for “field”). This explains why many of the letters in this series exist in the basic multilingual plane—because R is very commonly used, but A is not. You can find ℝ in the basic multilingual plane at U+211D.&lt;p&gt;I don’t know why people are interested in the X symbol. It’s just there to complete the alphabet. There are many other ranges like this used for writing mathematical formulas, like the range of bold letters, fraktur, script, etc.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Skeime</author><text>I strongly disagree that the bold symbols are better, even though they’re what blackboard bold was originally conceived to approximate. The reason: Bold font draws attention (ask a typographer about type color), but usually, the bolder symbols are not the ones requiring that attention. (If I read a text about real analysis, I know that the domains and codomains will be the real numbers, for example.) The blackboard bold versions stick out much less when looking at the greater composition of the page.</text></comment>
<story><title>Unicode Character “𝕏” (U+1D54F)</title><url>https://www.compart.com/en/unicode/U+1D54F</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>enriquto</author><text>&amp;gt; This is for math.&lt;p&gt;Heh.&lt;p&gt;The &amp;quot;tabs vs spaces&amp;quot; debate of mathematical typography is whether these symbols should be used at all in printing, or reserved for actual blackboards.
In LaTeX you can have actual boldface letters, so you should write a boldface letter R to represent the real numbers and so on.  Using &amp;quot;blackboard bold&amp;quot; in print looks terribly off to some (many?) people.</text></item><item><author>dietrichepp</author><text>This is for math.&lt;p&gt;In Latex, you get these symbols with \mathbb{}. They are most commonly used to represent to represent number sets, like the set of all integers Z (from the German), set of all natural numbers N, set of complex numbers C, set of all real numbers R, rationals Q (for “quotient”), set of quaternions H (named after Hamilton), or an unknown set F (for “field”). This explains why many of the letters in this series exist in the basic multilingual plane—because R is very commonly used, but A is not. You can find ℝ in the basic multilingual plane at U+211D.&lt;p&gt;I don’t know why people are interested in the X symbol. It’s just there to complete the alphabet. There are many other ranges like this used for writing mathematical formulas, like the range of bold letters, fraktur, script, etc.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>folkrav</author><text>Funny. Coming from a non-math background, having only one symbol to deal with feels less confusing than switching around symbols based on the medium it happens to be written on. Did one of the symbols come &amp;quot;first&amp;quot;?</text></comment>