Superscript and Subscript Characters in General Use

[Marcel Schneider]

On Thu, 12 Jan 2017 17:01:41 +0200, Khaled Hosny wrote:
> 
> > According to Wikipedia (
> > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HarfBuzz#Major_users
> > ), HarfBuzz is included in LibreOffice too, but being on Windows, despite of 
> > having just installed the brandnew version 5.2.4.2, I still donʼt get it, since 
> > it comes with 5.3: 
> > https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/ReleaseNotes/5.3#Text_Layout
> 
> LibreOffice indeed did not use HarfBuzz on Windows before 5.3, which is
> not released yet.
> 

Thank you anyway!

If I were on Linux, Iʼd got it all the time (my previous 4.2.4.2 > 4.1, when 
HarfBuzz was first included in LibreOffice). On Windows 7, I have DirectWrite, and 
this is probably why Arabic glyphs are substituted at my eye-sight, but I canʼt get 
the fractions displayed the standard way around in Internet Explorer 11, neither in 
a text box, nor in a web page, even when using Gabriola, DirectWriteʼs demo font.

This is why, again, I cannot use the intended functioning of U+2044 FRACTION SLASH, 
given that when I make up a web page relying on this intended display feature, any 
visitors who will load it in any version of Internet Explorer on Windows 7, may 
consider that Iʼm doing bad typography.

Hence again: Can any (good) reasons be identified for the following two shortcomings:

1) The implementation of U+2044, while punctually thorough, still isnʼt widespread;

2) The use of non-Galician-Italian-Portuguese-Spanish ordinal indicators is prohibited 
while they are de facto available in Unicode. [1]

Regards,
Marcel

[1] According to Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subscript_and_superscript#Alignment_examples
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subscript_and_superscript#Desktop_publishing
they must be even better than generic superscripting in word processors, that 
is considered too high and too light from a typographical point of view.