Position of the registered sign

[Asmus Freytag]

Unicode has formal stability guarantees that prevent many 
well-intentioned changes. These are usually reserved for cases where any 
change could be damaging.

While not a formal guarantee, we should treat all requests to make 
changes how we describe, annotated or classify any long-standing, 
widely-used characters as if the following principled applied: "First, 
do no harm".

In this case, the maximum we could do is rate some designs as "most 
suitable for plain text interchange and viewing" and explain why: the 
general expectation to see this symbol shown as an annotation and the 
need to keep it large enough to be recognizable/readable at typical text 
font sizes might make a design that occupies a middle-ground between 
full-size base line and small superscript glyphs the one that is most 
ideal for plain text environments.

That leaves open that other designs might work well if not viewed in 
plain  text, but styled to get the intended appearance.

We might also look at the origin and if all source character sets 
unified into the original Unicode had this symbol superscripted, we 
could state that historical fact.

All of this would not affect shipping fonts, but might affect people 
contemplating new designs. (And it might nip future discussions in the 
bud - which would be the most useful outcome).

A./


On 9/18/2024 1:48 PM, Mark E. Shoulson via Unicode wrote:
> On 9/18/24 09:56, Jukka K. Korpela via Unicode wrote:
>> Ivan Panchenko wrote via Unicode (unicode at corp.unicode.org) :
>>
>>> The registered sign (®, U+00AE) is already shown in superscript in 
>>> some typefaces and on the baseline in others.
>> The vertical position and the size (relative to font size) indeed 
>> varies.
>>
>> ....
>>> How about standardizing the position?
>
> Wouldn't belatedly making a "standard" of something that's been around 
> so long also create a lot of hassle for font designers, etc?  All of a 
> sudden, fonts that have been perfectly conformant for decades suddenly 
> are non-conformant, and people have to come out with new versions.  Or 
> what is FAR more likely, nobody cares and nobody notices and everyone 
> leaves the fonts alone, in which case what has been accomplished?  
> We'd have successfully declared some set of fonts "non-conformant", 
> but on the plus side... um. On the plus side, what?
>
> ~mark
>