Bit arithmetic on Unicode characters? / Re: Why incomplete subscript/superscript alphabet ?

[Marcel Schneider]

On Sun, 9 Oct 2016 13:00:30 +0200, Mark Davis ☕️ wrote:

[…]
> 
> I would recommend that any proposal for additional game symbols provide
> clear evidence for why those particular game symbols are required to be
> exchanged in plain text, in a way that many, many other possible game
> symbols are not.

I missed this point: “are required to be EXCHANGED in plain text.”

Would it be possible to add this as a requirement into the relevant section 
of TUS, please? Indeed I canʼt see any need to feed those French abbreviations
into a plain text data exchange. Weʼd rather write them out, or use the common 
acronyms:
‘BN’ for ‘Bibliothèque Nationale’ [National Library];
‘BM’ for ‘Bibliothèque Municipale’ [City Library].

However what we can do when it comes to abbreviate ‘bibliothèque’ or other 
words ending in ‘-que’ in plain text, one step I think we could do towards 
disambiguation is to emit a *new* recommendation for the abbreviation dot, 
that *is* already used in ‘M.’ for ‘Monsieur’ [Mister], and also in ‘cf.’ 
and other Latin abbreviations. So in plain text one could write either 
‘Biblio.que’ or ‘Bib.que’ for ‘Bibliothèque’ [Library].

While the official rejection rationale of *MODIFIER LETTER SMALL Q is still 
missing, I can now believe that it reiterated the recommendation to use 
markup, the more as MS Word does not mess up line spacing when superscript 
formatting is applied, and as this is better-looking in Tahoma than modifier 
letters when used to express semantics of abbreviation indicator or ordinal 
indicator. Iʼve run a test on ‘M^gr’, for ‘Monseigneur’ [Monsignor], and on 
‘3^e’. To avoid process garbage, Iʼve made the results available on-line.[1]

What got me really started, was the bizarre “Comment” on the Proposal to 
encode *MODIFIER LETTER SMALL Q. What I can do now, is to suggest to apply 
some kind of quality management on both sides, so that corporate officials 
refrain from publishing sloppy ad-hoc papers for consideration by the UTC, 
and Unicode wonʼt be reduced to accept all and everything for archiving in 
the Document Register.

I believe that this could be a practicable way to avoid other people to get 
bugged.

Regards,
Marcel

[1] Interested subscribers are welcome to view the screenshot from:
http://dispoclavier.com/French-abbrev-super-vs-modif.png
and to open the Word document from:
http://dispoclavier.com/French-abbrev-super-vs-modif.docx