Aw: Re: Missing Latin superscript lowercase letters

[Gabriel Tellez]

Mathematical typesetting and proper musical notation are not in the
scope of Unicode. (Just another reason I'm making my own character set.)

On Thu, Mar 23, 2023 at 11:43 AM Giacomo Catenazzi via Unicode <
unicode at corp.unicode.org> wrote:

>
> On 23 Mar 2023 15:55, Marius Spix via Unicode wrote:
> > In TeX and MathML, U+005E CIRCUMFLEX ACCENT ^ is used for superscript
> > and U+005F LOW LINE _ for subscript. This also allows power towers like
> > 2^(2^2), which are not possible with the existing Unicode characters.
> > This notation is recognized by mathmaticians, physicists and chemists
> > and widely accepted.
>
> > In some programming languages, e. g. Java or C++, ^ is used for the XOR
> > operation and _ for digit grouping, but that does not matter here,
> > because the context is always the decisive factor.
>
> > Many modern fonts have support for auto-alignment of digits in
> > combination with U+2044 FRACTION SLASH ⁄ like in that example: 13⁄37. So
> > it may be possible to design a font with special handling for ^ and _.
>
> Let's be honest: most people which are asking for superscript letters
> are not interested in display in mathematics.
>
> In any case /FRACTION SLASH/ can display some fractions, not all fonts
> have good support for it (e.g. on your mail I see it nice, but in the
> quoted text above I see it very ugly. But such formatting not only
> depends on font, but also on user preferences (and settings). Like
> tabular numbers (also often included in fonts), it may not be enabled by
> default, or it should be explicitly enabled e.g. on tables). Unicode do
> not support such presentation settings. So a FRACTION SLASH is just a
> solution for one specific case. Note: there is no delimiter, so usually
> fonts support it only for numbers, and maybe with limited number of
> digits. Maths is more then nubers. An other reasons to have maths in
> markup language.
>
> Also it is very annoying to type Unicode symbols not on the restricted
> number of keys in normal keyboards. We learn it also from computer
> languages. On earliest days computers languages had many symbols because
> every operations "needed" own symbols. Guess what? Now every modern
> computer languages uses practically only ASCII characters.
> Practicability is better then a ideal system few people uses.
>
> In any case, to display true maths, we need a specialised engine (and
> fonts). We are far from having current shaping engines (and fonts) to
> display maths in a nice way. (and personally I prefer that developers of
> shaping engines will works on improving the actual engine and fonts for
> human languages, before to go on such specialised field (which we have
> already good tools).
>
> Superscript letters can be done with current fonts and current shaping
> engines and many markup languages, so any discussion (and new
> characters) are distractions which do not direct us on a true Unicode
> mathematical typesetting (not a goal, like musical notation). And it
> will make things worst: searching engines must have to interpret
> everything. Speech synthesis will become much more complex (and it
> should understand where it is maths, chemistry or units: you will need
> to spell them differently. And probably many other unforeseen problems.
>
> ciao
>         cate
>
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