Stefan Persson [mailto:alsjebegrijptwatikbedoel@yahoo.se] asks how in the formula
mfågel = 1 kg
would the italic å be encoded?
Mathematics has a set of standard letters for mathematical symbols. They can include diacritics, which can be expressed using the appropriate combining marks. In your formula
mfågel = 1 kg
the m is a mathematical symbol, while the fågel is a natural language subscript. Italic shouldn't be used for such a subscript, since italic is used for symbols in mathematical notation (and consequently mathematical journals will change to fågel for this case). Else one might construe fågel to be a subscript consisting of the product of the five variables. Such natural language text is conveniently done with characters from the BMP, although you need some kind of markup to turn it into a subscript. If you insist on using italic for this kind of text and for characters like the italic ø that aren't used in standard mathematical notation, you can fall back to markup. Since such usage is extremely rare and not recommended for mathematical text, it wasn't perceived as important to represent unambiguously in plain text.
Murray
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