The Unicode Consortium Discussion Forum

What's the significance of the purple highlights in your spreadsheet?

The contention of the thread starter was that all superscript lowercase letters - except q - are encoded. Which addition would narrowly satisfy his particular intended use (French abbreviations), as long as he doesn't ever need an 'oe'.

However, the set would fail for uppercase (basic) Latin and for any extensions. Also, all accents would have to be done by combining characters. Why creating combined glyphs is possible, but correct glyph selection isn't, is a mystery he's not been able to answer.

French abbreviations use superscripts for the suffix portion of a word.
In this context the only letter that is used is the egrave. (BIBèque for bibliothèque, 1ère for première, nème for n-ième, etc.).
So I agree with Asmus: you must also add egrave as well as q in the supercript set.
The alternative should be to create a special unicode code page for France, for example utf-8-fr : what do you think about it ?

Following Asmus recommendation, I implemented variants in my font. Then, I tried to test browsers capabilities. There is a Mozilla CSS Extension that allows Firefox to do this. One problem is that you require Firefox! Anyway, I need a public box to store the drawing of the modifier letter small q.
('sub and sup tags treated as variants' test page: http://pecita.eu/variants.xhtml)

Hi.

At this stage of the discussion, I want to reformulate my original question.
I hope that will be proposed to complete the Latin alphabet for the Superscripts and the Small Caps. This concerns the superscript small letter q and the Small Caps Q and X. The justification is trivial consistency.

Does anyone agree to help me in suggesting this addition?

The premise is false.

There are roughly 1000 characters in the Latin script, excluding compatibility characters. The only ones encoded as super/sub are a fraction of that number, listed in:

http://goo.gl/c5HKf

Fleshing out the Latin set would involved adding something like 2000 characters, just for Latin. If it is taken as a precedent for adding super/subscripts for other scripts, that would mount up to a couple hundred thousand characters.

Hi Mark.
Thank you very much not to flee the debate. :)
You are right. Please, replace "Latin alphabet" (1) with "Latin alphabet" (2).
(1) 1000 Letters
(2) 26 letters

Hi.
I thought back to the consortium in preparing my greeting card in SVG for 2012. I wanted to use small caps in the manner of old postcards. I found what I wanted in the font ‘Linux Libertine O C’. It is still sad that to satisfy a need for variants of characters there being need to variants of fonts.
I look also to the page using the variants that I made by following the advice of Asmus: I think it is the only web page designed in this way and it will remain so long.
You would not, I am sure, let the memory of despots locked in their ego, flouting centuries of typography to justify their existence. So, please, fill the Latin alphabet with the superscript small letter q and the small capitals letters Q and X .
In advance, Happy New Year 2012!

Well! What a deafening silence!
What happened to that proposal?

If you look on the site: http://std.dkuug.dk/JTC1/SC2/WG2/ you will find that this document made it onto the preliminary agenda for meeting #58, but did not lead to a resolution. The full minutes of that meeting are not yet posted, so there's no indication whether it was reviewed.

:(

It's always the statu quo for you while the N4068 is applied in fonts for a while. :(