Position of the registered sign

[Christoph Päper]

Doug Ewell <doug at ewellic.org>:
> 
> Christoph Päper wrote:
> 
>> This is basically the same argument as for the asterisk ‘*’.

I thought it was a recent thread around here that made me think of this, but it was in fact an actual recent character encoding proposal: https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2024/24173-middle-asterisk.pdf

>> I think that this is a valid use case for a registered Variation Selector Sequence in both cases.
> 
> The problem is that there is no bright line in typeface design of ® between “clearly small and superscripted” and “clearly large and not superscripted.” Variation selectors indicate a binary option: either the “normal” or traditional design, or else an alternative.

I haven’t conducted any elaborate research on this. My impression was that a large majority of fonts opted to align the Registered symbol ® with the Copyright symbol © and the Phonogram symbol ℗, not with the Trademark symbol ™. The encircled C is almost always shown at capital or line height, the P and R are more variable indeed. 

The superscript style is probably due to their frequent use as footnote marker like word postfixes. A smart font could therefore treat the characters differently based on the preceding character. That’s probably an even better solution than a VSS, and certainly out of scope for Unicode. 

> Some fonts definitely show one style of ® or the other, of course, but there are many others that are somewhere in between — say, full-sized and slightly raised. Which binary option would encode that?

I would have said that the ©-like full-height style should be considered the default. (Apple‘s device and app I’m writing this in disagrees. 🤷‍♂️)
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