[FOM] Translating Frege's Grundgesetze: Metafont

[Richard Heck]

As some of you may already know, a project is underway at Arche to 
translate Frege's /Grundgesetze der Arithmetik/. Those of you familiar 
with the book will already know how many technical problems the project 
has to overcome. Many of these have already been resovled. For example, 
Josh Parsons, now at UC-Davis, has developed a LaTeX package, 
begrifftex, that allows Frege's notation to be represented in LaTeX and 
properly displayed: See
     http://weka.ucdavis.edu/~ahwiki/bin/view/Main/BegriffsschriftLaTeX
The package is available from CTAN mirrors at
    macros/latex/contrib/begriff/
A Java-based program that allows such formulae to be entered 
interactively has also been written. See:
     
http://weka.ucdavis.edu/~ahwiki/bin/view/Arche/BegriffsschriftSoftwareDownload
And a German organization that is working to put /Grundgesetze/ on-line 
in German has developed an XML-based language for representing Frege's 
formulae and adapted programs originally used with architectural 
drawings to scan the formulae and convert them into XML. Etc.

Most of the characters Frege uses have natural LaTeX equivalents, but 
there are a few that do not, for example, the script-like U Frege uses 
to mean: converse of a relation. We are thus looking for someone who has 
enough experience with Metafont to be able to produce representations of 
these characters.

If you would like to participate in the translation project in this way, 
please contact me. You will, of course, receive due credit for your 
contribution when the translation is published. (Oxford University Press 
is already on-board.)

Richard Heck