Re: Superscript and Subscript Characters in General Use

On 9 Jan 2017, at 22:34, Asmus Freytag <asmusf_at_ix.netcom.com> wrote:
>
> On 1/9/2017 1:39 PM, Marcel Schneider wrote:
>> Iʼm saddened to have fallen into a monologue. Thus Iʼll quickly debrief
>> the arguments opposed so far, to check whether Iʼm missing some point
>>
> There's a good reason for that. You are advocating something that everyone else
> accepts as going against a settled principle of the standard,

That’s part of it, but I think also that the thread is increasingly verbose and hard to follow.

I still think that the idea of adding U+???? SUPERSCRIPT and U+???? SUBSCRIPT might be worth contemplating; it would seem to provide a good answer to both Marcel’s and the French standards body’s concerns (wrt their proposed new ordinal indicator) while only using up two code points, and it’d be much easier to explain to people that superscripts and subscripts were a presentational matter and that they needed to talk to their font supplier. Plus it would work with existing platform rendering engines provided a font with an appropriate OpenType GSUB table was available.

Does anyone besides Marcel have any input on that idea? Is it worth writing a proposal to add SUPERSCRIPT and SUBSCRIPT? To give some examples:

  S^{té}

  U+0053 LATIN CAPITAL LETTER S
  U+0074 LATIN SMALL LETTER T
  U+???? SUPERSCRIPT
  U+0065 LATIN SMALL LETTER E
  U+???? SUPERSCRIPT
  U+0301 COMBINING ACUTE ACCENT

  i_{j}

  U+0069 LATIN SMALL LETTER I
  U+0070 LATIN SMALL LETTER J
  U+???? SUBSCRIPT

Perhaps the code points U+209E and U+209F could be used for SUBSCRIPT and SUPERSCRIPT respectively?

Are there other things that should be considered?

These are not supposed to be a replacement for rich text, which after all would allow nesting and indeed non-character data in subscripts and superscripts, but more as a way to avoid requests to add further superscript and subscript characters to Unicode itself and for limited use in “plain text”-only contexts (Twitter, for instance).

Kind regards,

Alastair.

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