Re: A sign/abbreviation for "magister"

On 31/10/2018 at 17:03, Khaled Hosny wrote:

A while I was localizing some application to Arabic and the developer
“helpfully” used m² for square meter, but that does not work for Arabic
because there is no superscript ٢ in Unicode, so I had to contact the
developer and ask for markup to be used for the superscript so that O
can use it as well. That nicely shows one of the problems with encoding
superscript symbols for arbitrary text styling in Unicode, you can’t
stop before duplicating the whole character repertoire or else you will be
discriminating against some writing system or uncommon usage.

It seems to me that Arabic is lacking two characters when using Eastern 
Arabic digits, not Western Arabic. Unicode allowing the m² and m³ unit 
notations, these should be implemented in any script using the same 
notation. Not the whole UCS, just these two, like Arabic per cent. Or do 
you have use cases in Arabic where superscript is used as an 
abbreviation indicator?

I don’t share the view according to which superscript is arbitrary in Latin.
There is a medieval tradition of superscripting. If it is in Arabic, then it 
would be limited to these two missing digits. Many many symbols were 
encoded for Arabic, notably mirrored arrows, so adding these two is quite
straightforward.

Sad that Arabic ² and ³ are still missing.

How about all the other sets of native digits?

A./

Best regards,

Marcel