Re: Superscript asterisk

From: Jonathan Coxhead (jonathan@doves.demon.co.uk)
Date: Wed Jun 30 1999 - 21:41:56 EDT


   Michael Everson wrote,

 | It might cause some problems with (e.g.) existing small capitals like
 | LATIN LETTER SMALL CAPITAL R, which would subsequently have to be
 | decomposable.

   I wonder what you thought of my suggestion to define many, many
new decompositions, with the aid of a few new "presentation suggestion"
characters

      PRESENTATION SUGGESTION ALTERNATIVE
      PRESENTATION SUGGESTION BLACK LETTER
      PRESENTATION SUGGESTION DOUBLE-STRUCK
      PRESENTATION SUGGESTION ITALIC
      PRESENTATION SUGGESTION LIGATURE
      PRESENTATION SUGGESTION NARROW
      PRESENTATION SUGGESTION SCRIPT
      PRESENTATION SUGGESTION SMALL
      PRESENTATION SUGGESTION SUBSCRIPT
      PRESENTATION SUGGESTION SUPERSCRIPT
      PRESENTATION SUGGESTION VERTICAL
      PRESENTATION SUGGESTION WIDE

and a grouping character

      START GROUP

(terminated by POP DIRECTIONAL FORMATTING)?

   It sounds as thugh these might be very useful for a script
containing a lot of superscripts, small caps, etc. LATIN LETTER SMALL
CAPITAL R is then decomposed as LATIN CAPITAL LETTER R + PRESENTATION
SUGGESTION SMALL, and should be visible (if represented by its
decomposition) in some form even on devices that have never heard of
the Finno-Ugric Phonetic Alphabet.

   For the character mentioned in the subject line, this gives

      asterisk, presentation suggestion superscript.

   It allows a good start on plain-text mathematics: E = mc˛ can be
written as

      latin capital letter e, presentation suggestion italic,
      space,
      equals sign,
      space,
      start group,
         latin small letter m,
         latin small letter c,
      pop directional formatting,
      presentation suggestion italic,
      digit two, presentation suggestion superscript.

   And finally, given Ken Whistler's point

 | U+220A SMALL ELEMENT OF is actually the math character know as the
 | straight epsilon. It is more properly conceived of as a symbolic
 | variant of the epsilon, rather than one of the cup-shaped set
 | relations. The glyph is being corrected in Unicode 3.0 and a
 | clarifying note has been added to the text.

it could be decomposed as

      greek small letter epsilon, presentation suggestion alternative.

   But I don't want to appear to be flogging a dead horse, so I'll stop
now. :-)

        /|
 o o o (_|/
        /|
       (_/



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