Superscript and Subscript Characters in General Use

[Richard Wordingham]

On Wed, 11 Jan 2017 07:00:52 +0100 (CET)
Marcel Schneider <charupdate at orange.fr> wrote:

> The phenomenon isnʼt actually limited to plain text environments. See:
> 
> http://stackoverflow.com/questions/13878772/how-to-display-classic-fractions-in-css-javascript
> | You can also use the straight unicode approach to render ¹⁹⁄₄₅:
> | 
> | &#x00B9;&#x2079;&#x2044;&#x2084;&#x2085;
> | 
> | (See the wikipedia article.)
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode_subscripts_and_superscripts

If you follow the link from that page to
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subscript_and_superscript , you will
notice an immediate issue with the position of the subscripts.  This is
why the use of explicitly coded subscript and superscript digits for
vulgar fractions is not recommended.  Rather, one needs to hope that
the font one is using supports U+2044 FRACTION SLASH.  As not all fonts
support all superscript and subscript digits, text using them may
render badly, whereas U+2044 itself will usually be rendered at least
tolerably even if the glyph comes from a different font to the digits.

The truly straight Unicode approach in HTML is to use 19&#x2044;45.
Just entering those 5 characters into a text entry box in Firefox gave
me a properly formatted vulgar fraction.  That is how vulgar fractions
are supposed to work.  Unfortunately, one may need to avoid 'exciting
new fonts' in favour of those with a large, working repertoire. 

Richard.