Re: Request for Inclusion of Subscript for the English Letter “y”

Christoph Päper christoph.paeper at crissov.de
Wed Nov 6 05:41:03 CST 2024


Thanks to Asmus Freytag for a very good synopsis of the current state of affairs. 
> In mathematical notation, any character can be a super or subscript, …
> 
> There is generic use of (mostly) superscript numbers in text, …
> 
> There are other notations, mainly phonetic, that have super/subscript forms but do not need recursive subscripting (…), the super or subscript form often acts pretty much like any other letter in the notation, except for its shape. Common to these notations is that there's a fixed set of such shapes; they don't even cover a full basic alphabet; (…).
> 
In other words, linguists need to provide proof of prior use for superscript and subscript (and also small capital) letters (mostly Latin, but also several Greek and some Cyrillic) for them to be encoded individually. 
> (…) In text, the plain text does not carry font information and it is fully acceptable to render the result in any font that supports the letters in question. (…)
> 
> In math notation, you have the situation that mathematicians have used the contrast between different font shapes to carry meaning. (…)
> 
> Having the character for all shape variants used for variables encoded directly makes this near plaintext form very powerful. (…)
> 
> (…): the additions for phonetic notations will never cover the generic use of math, while the few styled alphabets for math do nothing for general text use. (…)
> 
Mathematicians, on the other hand, did not need to prove that each and every Latin letter, in upper and lower cases, had already been used in all of the typographic styles. They simply got encoded as complete sets (i.e. “math alphabets”) under the mere assumption that there was existing usage. However, Unicode still implausibly claims that it won’t encode something – the “missing” Latin superscript, subscript and smallcaps letters in particular – just for “completeness”. 

That’s a bit frustrating and inefficient. So much discussion and confusion could have been avoided if Unicode had just pragmatically added full basic (i.e. 26-letter) Latin alphabets in superscript, subscript and smallcaps early on. One practical disadvantage, with the missing ones being added gradually and only after sufficient proof of existing usage has been provided, is that fonts need to be updated over time and fallbacks to other fonts need to be employed in the meantime, which leads to unaesthetic results. 
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