From: Jukka K. Korpela (jkorpela@cs.tut.fi)
Date: Mon Apr 03 2006 - 11:50:52 CST
On Mon, 3 Apr 2006, Anto'nio Martins-Tuva'lkin wrote:
> The "masculine ordinal indicator" U+00BA *is* superscript "o", optionally
> underlined.
For some value of "is"; not for the value "is identical to".
U+00BA is a Unicode character with a code point of its own. It is not
identical to any other Unicode character, styled or unstyled.
It was taken into Unicode as a compatibility character due to its presence
in ISO 8859-1 and other standards, where it appears due to its role in
Spanish orthography. It may be replaced by the letter "o" in superscript
style, but this may involve loss of formatting information.
If you wish to use U+00BA as an all-purpose superscript version of the
letter "o", nobody can really prevent you. But it'll be on your own risk.
>> don't use the KELVIN SYMBOL character, there is no reason to, nor to use
>> the DEGREE CELCIUS character
>
> Both are cannonically decomposable to respectively U+004B and U+00B0
> U+0043.
No, DEGREE CELSIUS has _compatibility_ decomposition. But regarding the
suitability of using these characters, check chapter 14 (Symbols) of the
Unicode Standard, subsection "Letterlike symbols":
http://www.unicode.org/versions/Unicode4.0.0/ch14.pdf#page=6
The decompositions are formal properties. The _usage recommendation_ is
that normally the common Latin letter "K" be used for the kelvin and the
degree sign followed by the common Latin letter "C" be used to represent
degrees Celsius.
-- Jukka "Yucca" Korpela, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/
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