Why incomplete subscript/superscript alphabet ?

[Philippe Verdy]

2016-10-06 21:02 GMT+02:00 Doug Ewell <doug at ewellic.org>:

> >> Like «3ᵉ̀ᵐᵉ» ? It already works on my laptop (Thunderbird in Ubuntu
> >> 16.04) The superscripted part is 1D49 + 0300 + 1D50 + 1D49, and there
> >> is nothing to add.
> >
> > It does not render very well, the accent is not correctly positioned
> > vertically (far too high) above the superscript e and colliding with
> > the previous line of text at normal line-height, because fonts do not
> > support this pair with proper positioning.
>
> http://www.unicode.org/faq/char_combmark.html#12b
>
> Poor display support today is not supposed to be a rationale for
> permanently encoding new precomposed letters.
>

I've not asked for that, I just wanted to comment the fact that using
subscripts encoded for compatibilty with legacy standards or specific uses
(such as IPA) by following them with random combining diacritics not
designed for this usage is not the way to go. The generic styling markup
(appropriate for each kind of document is the way to go.

For abbreviations in plain-text files, it is often better to not even try
to render these superscript styles, without using any additional markup at
all, and then use the full range of letters for relevant scripts.
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