Writing with Unicode

Recently I adjusted my environment to use utf8 encoding. One of the motivation for this was to use Unicode math symbols while writing text files. I am using vim/gvim as editor and for a moment the solution for me to enter Unicode characters are abbreviations in insert mode (the tag are set to minimize the risk of collision with ordinary words or variable/function names).

Here is snippet of my .vimrc

"  ABBREVIATIONS
"
iab yRn   <C-V>u211D<C-V>u207F
iab yR1   <C-V>u211D<C-V>u00B9   
iab yR3   <C-V>u211D<C-V>u00B3
iab yR2   <C-V>u211D<C-V>u00B2
iab ySub  <C-V>u2282
iab yIn   <C-V>u2208
iab yFun  <C-V>u2192

Whit these abbreviations the stream of characters:

  f: X yFun Y, where X ySub yR1 and Y ySub yR2

is automatically expanded into:

 f: X → Y, where X ⊂ ℝ¹ and Y ⊂ ℝ²

• http://symbolcodes.tlt.psu.edu/bylanguage/mathchart.html#calc
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Unicode_chart_Arrows