-We briefly summarise the requirements of the standards discussed so far in regards to the precision of mathematical operations:
-\begin{itemize}
- \item {\bf PostScript} predates the IEEE-754 standard and originally specified a floating point representation with ? bits of exponent and ? bits of mantissa. Version ? of the PostScript standard changed to specify IEEE-754 binary32 ``single precision'' floats.
- \item {\bf PDF} has also specified IEEE-754 binary32 since version ?. Importantly, the standard states that this is a \emph{maximum} precision; documents created with higher precision would not be viewable in Adobe Reader.
- \item {\bf SVG} specifies a minimum of IEEE-754 binary32 but recommends more bits be used internally
- \item {\bf Javascript} uses binary32 floats for all operations, and does not distinguish between integers and floats.
- \item {\bf Python} uses binary64 floats
- \item {\bf Matlab} uses binary64 floats
- \item {\bf Mathematica} uses some kind of terrifying symbolic / arbitrary float combination
- \item {\bf Maple} is similar but by many accounts horribly broken
-
-\end{itemize}
+In ``The METAFONT book'' Knuth appears to describe coordinates as fixed point numbers: ``The computer works internally with coordinates that are integer multiples of $\frac{1}{65536} \approx 0.00002$ of the width of a pixel''\cite{knuth1983metafont}. There is no mention of precision in ``The \TeX book''. In 2007 Beebe claimed this was due to the lack of standardised floating point arithmetic on computers at the time; a problem that the IEEE-754 was designed to solve\cite{beebe2007extending}. Beebe also suggests that \TeX and METAFONT could now be modified to use IEEE-754 arithmetic.
+
+\subsection{SVG}
+
+The SVG standard specifies a minimum precision equivelant to that of ``single precision floats'' (presumably referring to IEEE-754) with a range of \verb/-3.4e+38F/ to \verb/+3.4e+38F/, and states ``It is recommended that higher precision floating point storage and computation be performed on operations such as
+coordinate system transformations to provide the best possible precision and to prevent round-off errors.''\cite{svg2011-1.1} An SVG Viewer may refer to itself as ``High Quality'' if it uses a minimum of ``double precision'' floats.