<html><head><meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"></head><body dir="auto">Doug Ewell <doug@ewellic.org>:<blockquote type="cite"><div dir="ltr"><span>Christoph Päper wrote:</span><br><span></span><br><blockquote type="cite"><span>This is basically the same argument as for the asterisk ‘*’. </span></blockquote></div></blockquote><div><br></div><div>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: <a href="https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2024/24173-middle-asterisk.pdf">https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2024/24173-middle-asterisk.pdf</a></div><br><blockquote type="cite"><div dir="ltr"><blockquote type="cite"><span>I think </span>that this is a valid use case for a registered Variation Selector Sequence in both cases.</blockquote><span></span><br><span>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. </span></div></blockquote><div><br></div><div>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. </div><div><br></div><div>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. </div><br><blockquote type="cite"><div dir="ltr"><span>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?</span><br></div></blockquote><div><br></div><div>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. 🤷♂️)</div></body></html>