Superscript and Subscript Characters in General Use

Marcel Schneider charupdate at orange.fr
Fri Jan 13 18:19:30 CST 2017


On Wed, 11 Jan 2017 08:32:12 +0000, Richard Wordingham wrote:
[…]
> The truly straight Unicode approach in HTML is to use 19⁄45. 
> 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.

A new “Fraction Slash and Fonts” thread in the BÉPO community has brought up 
that this works mainly with new and ambitious fonts:
• Carlito
• Fira Sans
• Linux Biolinum
• Linux Libertine
• Roboto
• Source Sans Pro
• Source Serif Pro
• Ubuntu

By contrast, the typefaces not supporting U+2044 correctly include:
- FreeSans
- FreeSerif
- Open Sans
- DejàVu
- Droid
- Liberation
- TeX Gyre

BTW, the Times New Roman font that the Mailing List Archives specify, belongs to 
this latter category, so that the fractions with U+2044 and normal size digits 
display in fallback mode.

Software support is mainly found in open projects as we have seen:
• HarfBuzz, and its users:
• LibreOffice
• Firefox
• Chrome

In the meantime, Microsoft products not supporting U+2044 correctly include:
- DirectWrite
- Internet Explorer including its last version 11

➔ Does anybody know why Microsoft is reluctant in supporting U+2044?

➔ And why on the other hand, the widespread and popular way of writing fractions 
   as <superscript>U+2044<subscript> sequences is discouraged and even ridiculized?

Regards,
Marcel



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