Missing Latin superscript lowercase letters

[Peter Constable]

Doug Ewell responded:

> an image of mathematical or engineering equations wouldn’t exactly be the best supporting evidence for encoding them in plain text.

Not only would it not be the best supporting evidence, it wouldn’t be considered supporting evidence _at all_ since math formula layout is not plain text. As Asmus responded,

> what is superscripted is not the individual letter, but the expression. In principle, the superscripted expression is arbitrarily complex and thus the superscript is fully recursive.


Andreas says below,
> Just one example where the notorious Opentype makeshift would not be a preferable solution and where hard-coding will be needed:

OpenType makeshift? Perhaps you’re not familiar with the MATH table in OpenType, which allows handling all of the typographic nuance in math layout examples such as were shown below.

MATH - The mathematical typesetting table (OpenType 1.9) - Typography | Microsoft Learn<https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/typography/opentype/spec/math>



Peter Constable


From: Unicode <unicode-bounces at corp.unicode.org> On Behalf Of A. Stötzner via Unicode
Sent: Tuesday, March 7, 2023 4:36 AM
To: Don Peterson via Unicode <unicode at corp.unicode.org>
Subject: Missing Latin superscript lowercase letters

I suspect this has been discussed several times before.
We have almost the entire a–z encoded, although smashed in two places:

in the 02xx block we have  ʰ ʲ ˡ ʳ ˢ ʷ ˣ ʸ

in the 1Dxx block we have  ᵃ ᵇ ᶜ ᵈ ᵉ ᶠ ᵍ ᵏ ᵐ ᵒ ᵖ ᵗ ᵘ ᶻ

apart from that we have ª and º another time in the 00xx range.

Only  i n q  are missing as superscript modifiers. Wouldn’t it be sensible to fill that gap at last?
Just one example where the notorious Opentype makeshift would not be a preferable solution and where hard-coding will be needed:
[cid:image001.png at 01D9569B.E55A72D0]

greetings to all,
A. Stötzner
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