Re: Superscript and Subscript Characters in General Use

From: Asmus Freytag <asmusf_at_ix.netcom.com>
Date: Fri, 6 Jan 2017 00:21:29 -0800

Nevertheless, 
the user might prioritize the stability of the document when it comes to plain text, 
and he could be interested in a better-looking display of letters that elsewhere 
should be superscripted. Here, the modifier letters could be a ready-to-use fallback

The use of such hacks is destabilizing to any efforts to systematically format superscripts
across a document. Text fonts may not support them, because for "ordinary" text, by Unicode's
recommendation, one would use ordinary letters / digits with superscript markup. So, by using
these hacks, anytime a document is re-formatted with a different font style, you are in danger of
either losing these to boxes, or to be faced with random font styles.

If you don't think that is a real problem: some (many) character pickers will insert font+code point into
an application. These font bindings often survive and suddenly your text, when read on a different
computer looks like a ransom note, just because the new machine has a new "default" font, and
that is applied to all letters that don't have a specific font binding.

Some font pickers are "stupid" enough to do this for simple accented code points that would have
been in the currently selected font anyway. Your suggestions will just add to these problems.

If editing in a rich text environment, work in rich text. And then lean on implementers to get
export correct to other rich text formats....

A./

Received on Fri Jan 06 2017 - 02:21:57 CST