4 ms·

I don't understand, why Unicode must (should?) contain superscript and subscript glyphes at all. Declared goal of Unicode is to have encoding of all characters

I don't understand, why Unicode must (should?) contain superscript and subscript glyphes at all. Declared goal of Unicode is to have encoding of all characters used by all languages, past and modern. Subscript and superscript are not used by any language as separate characters, it is typesetting property. It should be solved by other means, not by character/glyph encoding. Should Unicode include ALL characters strike-out? Underlined? Double-underlined? Small-caps variant for all letters for languages where small-caps are used in typography tradition? And, BTW, what do you mean by "all letters"? Should Unicode contain sub/superscript variants of Hangul or Devanagari or letters from hundreds other non-latin-alphabae languages? So, Unicode must be approximately tripled, bar hieroglyphic part (and why hieroglyphics should not be sub/superscripted?)?

cygx 5y ago
Should Unicode contain sub/superscript variants of Hangul or Devanagari or letters from hundreds other non-latin-alphabae languages? Nope, you'd use markers similar to U+200E (LEFT-TO-RIGHT MARK) and U+200F (RIGHT-TO-LEFT MARK) that already exist to indicate text direction (which is also a typesetting property).
- lifthrasiir 5y ago
  They are relevant because Unicode had to define the bidirectional rendering and not every rendering can be automatically inferred from logical (abstract) characters. Unicode has no reason to define the general text rendering including subscripts and superscripts, so there is no reason for Unicode to define control characters for them.
  - cygx 5y ago
    Unicode had to define the bidirectional rendering Why? They could have left this for a higher layer to handle.
    - lifthrasiir 5y ago
      Unicode defines characters, their semantics and (very flexible) guidelines for rendering them. Unlike, say, bold, italic or super/subscripts, bidirectionality is an intrinsic property of those characters and can't be easily refactored.
      - cygx 5y ago
        Should a universal text encoding provide a way to encode the names of mathematical and physical quantities? In my opinion, yes. If it can't, it's not fit for purpose, no matter what is or is not an intrinsic property of some characters...
      - thaumasiotes 5y ago
        > Unicode defines characters, their semantics Unicode specifically states that it doesn't define the semantics of characters. That would seriously interfere with its purpose of defining characters. There are some notable exceptions, and they are acknowledged to be mistakes.
        lifthrasiir 5y ago
        > Unicode specifically states that it doesn't define the semantics of characters. The Unicode Standard explicitly says otherwise: > Characters have well-defined semantics. These semantics are defined by explicitly assigned character properties, rather than implied through the character name or the position of a character in the code tables (see Section 3.5, Properties). [1] > The Unicode Standard associates a rich set of semantics with characters and, in some instances, with code points. The support of character semantics is required for conformance; see Section 3.2, Conformance Requirements. [2] To be fair, it refers to "character" semantics which is more or less abstracted by character properties. It is not like that, for example, △ U+25B2 WHITE UP-POINTING TRIANGLE UNICODE CHARACTER can only ever be used for denoting triangles. But it has defined semantics in the way that the character has properties expected for such symbols. [1] https://www.unicode.org/versions/Unicode14.0.0/ch02.pdf#page=11 https://www.unicode.org/versions/Unicode14.0.0/ch02.pdf#page... [2] https://www.unicode.org/versions/Unicode14.0.0/ch04.pdf#page=2 https://www.unicode.org/versions/Unicode14.0.0/ch04.pdf#page...
BaRRaKID 5y ago
This is probably an edge case, but I work in lab software that uses chemical symbols and having sub and super characters saves lots of headaches. I can just store "CO₂" in a database, query it, and display it back as a simple string, or display values in scientific notation like 1,3×10³, without having to use any formatting. But to be honest I'm not sure what the parent comment wants to see added because at the moment having all the letters from A-Z, numbers from 0-9, and plus minus and equals signs as both subscript and superscript seems to be enough.
- cygx 5y ago
  Upper-case subscripts are missing, for one: I'm not allowed to talk about the normal force F_N in plain text email. Superscript and subscript Greek letters would also be nice to have, eg in context of relativity.
  - blacklion 5y ago
    Why not Devanagari then? This Europe-centric point of view bother me. Also, I've seen a lot of different symbols as subscripts in mathematical and physical articles, like squares, triangles, arrows, etc.
    - cygx 5y ago
      Why not Devanagari then? This Europe-centric point of view bother me. Sure: As I mentioned in another comment, I'd add markers to enable arbitrary super and subscripting. However, the question I responded to was asking what specifically people were missing in practice, and the examples I gave are things I personally would have used if they had been available.

cygx 5y ago

Should Unicode contain sub/superscript variants of Hangul or Devanagari or letters from hundreds other non-latin-alphabae languages? Nope, you'd use markers similar to U+200E (LEFT-TO-RIGHT MARK) and U+200F (RIGHT-TO-LEFT MARK) that already exist to indicate text direction (which is also a typesetting property).

lifthrasiir 5y ago
They are relevant because Unicode had to define the bidirectional rendering and not every rendering can be automatically inferred from logical (abstract) characters. Unicode has no reason to define the general text rendering including subscripts and superscripts, so there is no reason for Unicode to define control characters for them.
- cygx 5y ago
  Unicode had to define the bidirectional rendering Why? They could have left this for a higher layer to handle.
  - lifthrasiir 5y ago
    Unicode defines characters, their semantics and (very flexible) guidelines for rendering them. Unlike, say, bold, italic or super/subscripts, bidirectionality is an intrinsic property of those characters and can't be easily refactored.
    - cygx 5y ago
      Should a universal text encoding provide a way to encode the names of mathematical and physical quantities? In my opinion, yes. If it can't, it's not fit for purpose, no matter what is or is not an intrinsic property of some characters...
    - thaumasiotes 5y ago
      > Unicode defines characters, their semantics Unicode specifically states that it doesn't define the semantics of characters. That would seriously interfere with its purpose of defining characters. There are some notable exceptions, and they are acknowledged to be mistakes.
      - lifthrasiir 5y ago
        > Unicode specifically states that it doesn't define the semantics of characters. The Unicode Standard explicitly says otherwise: > Characters have well-defined semantics. These semantics are defined by explicitly assigned character properties, rather than implied through the character name or the position of a character in the code tables (see Section 3.5, Properties). [1] > The Unicode Standard associates a rich set of semantics with characters and, in some instances, with code points. The support of character semantics is required for conformance; see Section 3.2, Conformance Requirements. [2] To be fair, it refers to "character" semantics which is more or less abstracted by character properties. It is not like that, for example, △ U+25B2 WHITE UP-POINTING TRIANGLE UNICODE CHARACTER can only ever be used for denoting triangles. But it has defined semantics in the way that the character has properties expected for such symbols. [1] https://www.unicode.org/versions/Unicode14.0.0/ch02.pdf#page=11 https://www.unicode.org/versions/Unicode14.0.0/ch02.pdf#page... [2] https://www.unicode.org/versions/Unicode14.0.0/ch04.pdf#page=2 https://www.unicode.org/versions/Unicode14.0.0/ch04.pdf#page...

BaRRaKID 5y ago

This is probably an edge case, but I work in lab software that uses chemical symbols and having sub and super characters saves lots of headaches. I can just store "CO₂" in a database, query it, and display it back as a simple string, or display values in scientific notation like 1,3×10³, without having to use any formatting. But to be honest I'm not sure what the parent comment wants to see added because at the moment having all the letters from A-Z, numbers from 0-9, and plus minus and equals signs as both subscript and superscript seems to be enough.

cygx 5y ago
Upper-case subscripts are missing, for one: I'm not allowed to talk about the normal force F_N in plain text email. Superscript and subscript Greek letters would also be nice to have, eg in context of relativity.
- blacklion 5y ago
  Why not Devanagari then? This Europe-centric point of view bother me. Also, I've seen a lot of different symbols as subscripts in mathematical and physical articles, like squares, triangles, arrows, etc.
  - cygx 5y ago
    Why not Devanagari then? This Europe-centric point of view bother me. Sure: As I mentioned in another comment, I'd add markers to enable arbitrary super and subscripting. However, the question I responded to was asking what specifically people were missing in practice, and the examples I gave are things I personally would have used if they had been available.