Why summation top and bottom ⎲⎳?

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I totally understand the necessity of integral, and brackets by pieces (2320 2321 239B-23AE) Since it helps building large notations.

But the for the large summation 23B3 23B4, if one stretch these two, they will still lose their shapes. I do not understand what is the logic behind separating this character, or why not a corresponding one for the product symbol 220F. Furthermore, I wonder in which case these two symbols should be used.

2 Answers

This doesn't answer the question fully, but the following paragraph from Unicode Technical Report #28: Unicode 3.2 is probably the most authoritative explanation you can find:

Symbol Pieces. [to follow “APL Functional Symbols”] The characters in the range U+239B..U+23B3, plus U+23B7, comprise a set of bracket and other symbol fragments for use in mathematical typesetting. These pieces originated in older font standards, but have been used in past mathematical processing as characters in their own right to make up extra-tall glyphs for enclosing multi-line mathematical formulae. Mathematical fences are ordinarily sized to the content that they enclose. However, in creating a large fence, the glyph is not scaled proportionally; in particular the displayed stem weights must remain compatible with the accompanying smaller characters. Thus, simple scaling of font outlines cannot be used to create tall brackets. Instead, a common technique is to build up the symbol from pieces. In particular, the characters U+239B LEFT PARENTHESIS UPPER HOOK through U+23B3 SUMMATION BOTTOM represent a set of glyph pieces for building up large versions of the fences (, ), [, ], {, and }, and of the large operators ∑ and ∫. These brace and operator pieces are compatibility characters. They should not be used in stored mathematical text, but are often used in the data stream created by display and print drivers.

This is followed by a table showing how pieces are intended to be used together to create specific symbols.

Unicode mostly standardises existing character repertoires, and keeps their peculiarities so that conversions round-trip properly. A corresponding product symbol is not part of Unicode because the originating character repertoire did not have one. Ask on https://www.unicode.org/consortium/distlist-unicode.html about the provenance of the summation top/bottom.

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