Why incomplete subscript/superscript alphabet ?

Ken Whistler kenwhistler at att.net
Thu Oct 6 13:03:25 CDT 2016


On 10/6/2016 9:32 AM, Oren Watson wrote:
> I meant, petition say the devs of Konsole, iTerm, xterm etc, and other 
> programs which deal purely in plain text to support 8b and 8c 
> characters for formatting. Markup doesn't exist everywhere.
>

Fair enough.

But most actual terminals didn't support partial line advances (although 
line printers and electric typewriter terminals could):

http://www.ccs.neu.edu/research/gpc/MSim/vona/terminal/VT100_Escape_Codes.html

so there would seem to be little call for terminal emulators to do so in 
such cases. (And by the way, it is arguable that markup *does* exist for 
terminals. After all, that is what character attribute controls like 
^[[1m for bold mode are all about.)

And *consoles*, which pretty much by definition do *un*formatted text, 
are poor contexts to try to fancy up with out-of-scope formatting 
requirements.

In general I fail to see any significant ROI for this kind of 
requirement. Trying to patch up consoles with hacks to deal with Latin 
superscripts and subscripts is just another scheme that will run up on 
the rocks at the very next formatting requirement thrown at it -- or for 
that matter, when attempting to render plain text in nearly *any* 
complex script encoded in Unicode.

--Ken

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