[tei-council] pdf version of guidelines, fonts

[Syd Bauman]

> I have come across only the term "mantissa" , rather than "significand" 
> used here as alternatives. Is that a British preference or am I just out 
> of date? 

Idunno, I'm not a mathematician nor a computer scientist. To my
knowledge the words are pretty much synonymous.

http://www.reference.com/browse/wiki/Significand
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/mantissa
http://ccrma.stanford.edu/~jos/mdft/Floating_Point_Numbers.html

And just now via a Google search I came across a reference page that
makes it clear some computer scientists use the term "significand":
http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/iseries/v5r3/topic/rzatk/CVTFPDF.htm

And another that actually talks a bit about the history of the word:
http://groups.google.com/group/comp.arch.arithmetic/browse_thread/thread/300c07cfa8a2c5b4

Although to be fair, "mantissa" has almost an order of magnitude more
hits than "significand".


> And I still think tis description is far too detailed and
> technical!

I'd be more than happy to see a more user-friendly description, and
am looking forward to Gabby's take on it. But I don't want to loose
precision, either. (It's easy to write a description that makes it
confusing as to whether C = 3E8 m/s or C = 8E3 m/s.)