Re: Superscript asterisk

From: Edward Cherlin (edward.cherlin.sy.67@aya.yale.edu)
Date: Fri Jul 02 1999 - 03:46:56 EDT


At 03:54 -0700 6/30/1999, Michael Everson wrote:
>Ar 00:45 -0700 1999-06-30, scríobh Ricardo Bermell-Benet:
>>Torsten Mohrin has given to me the perfect reply
>>to my question, a Unicode Standard citation:
>>
>>"Superscripts and subscripts have been included in the Unicode
>>Standard only to provide compatibility with existing character
>>sets. In general, the Unicode character encoding does not attempt
>>to describe the positioning of a character above or below the
>>baseline in typographical layout."
>
>There are superscript International Phonetic Alphabet characters which were
>not included to support any particular character sets so far as I know, but
>phonetic entities like aspiration (h). We (Finland, Norway, Ireland) are
>preparing a proposal for Finno-Ugric Phonetic Alphabet support which
>contains rather a lot of superscript, subscript, and small-capital letters,
>and whose semantics are completely different from the plain letters, and
>must be distinguished from them in plain text (for lexicographical
                                    ^^^^^^^^^^
>searching, etc.).

Why in plain text? This is an obvious application for developing an XML
tagging scheme or some other form of markup.

>So the text in the Unicode Standard overstates things, unfortunately.
>
>It seems to me that asterisks are normally superscripted, though.

Actually, in the case of regular expressions, I have never seen anything
but plain ASCII asterisk (which as you say is somewhat raised in many
fonts) used to signal "0 or more repetitions of the preceding".

>--
>Michael Everson * Everson Gunn Teoranta * http://www.indigo.ie/egt
>15 Port Chaeimhghein Íochtarach; Baile Átha Cliath 2; Éire/Ireland
>Guthán: +353 1 478 2597 ** Facsa: +353 1 478 2597 (by arrangement)
>27 Páirc an Fhéithlinn; Baile an Bhóthair; Co. Átha Cliath; Éire

--
Edward Cherlin                        President
Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial E-mail
Help outlaw Spam.       <http://www.cauce.org/>
Talk to us at             <news:comp.org.cauce>



This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Tue Jul 10 2001 - 17:20:47 EDT