Superscript and Subscript Characters in General Use

[Marcel Schneider]

On Thu, 05 Jan 2017 07:22:39 +0000, Denis Jacquerye wrote:
> 
> On Thu, 5 Jan 2017 at 06:03 Marcel Schneider  wrote:
> 
> > On Wed, 04 Jan 2017 12:20:14 -0700, Doug Ewell wrote:
> > >
> > > Marcel Schneider wrote:
> > >
> > > >> I don't understand the relevance to vulgar fractions.
> > > >
> > > > Vulgar fractions represented using super- and subscript digits around
> > > > the FRACTION SLASH U+2044
> > >
> > > Don't do that.
> > >
> > > The fact that someone, even a Microsoft MVP, posted an article about
> > > this glyph hack does not make it a good idea.
> >
> > I found it a good idea long before I found and read the article.
> >
> >
> It is not such a good idea, if at all. Superscript and subscript are not
> the same thing as denominator and numerators. Many fonts make the
> difference and ½ or 1⁄2 or 1/2 will not look like of ¹/₂ or ¹⁄₂ in many
> cases. 

Indeed I remember that conclusion from the 2015 thread. If the fraction 
formatting facility is available, it should be used. If it isnʼt, Iʼd suggest 
not to leave the ASCII fallbacks, but to use super- and subscripts instead. 
This still seems an overall second-best solution, that may turn into best solution 
depending on the font used. If Arial Unicode MS is used (though it is no longer 
a part of new Windows versions), it really looks exactly like preformatted 
fractions in the same font. But I can understand that denominators are meant 
to align on the baseline, while subscripts are often set slightly below. 

Though sometimes suboptimal, “styled” plain text custom vulgar fractions still 
offer a far better readability than their plain ASCII fallbacks. To be consistent, 
fractions could be represented throughout this way in a given document, avoiding 
the mix-up of preformatted fractions with precomposed fractions. 

Marcel