Re: how to add all latin (and greek) subscripts

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Hello Ondrej,

as far as I understood it, Unicode is not indented for capturing all
semantic content of mathematical formulas. There are, however, diverse
markup languages to represent that, ancient ones like TeX/LaTeX and more
recent developments like MathML and the approach used in Microsoft's
Word 2007 which uses a combined model of storing XML-ly stuff and
entering TeX-like syntax by hand. Details on the latter may be found in
Unicode TN #28 by Murray Sargent.

The sub- and superscripts present in Unicode are spread through multiple
code ranges and thus I assume they are partly there for compatibility
reasons (¹, ², ³), since they were present in other charsets before,
partly extensions to those compatibility forms (⁴, ⁵, ⁶, ...), partly
necessary for IPA. For accurate display of formulas you need markup that
captures the semantics and a layout engine that lays out math, Unicode
alone won't help there.

Regards,
Johannes Rössel

Ondrej Certik wrote:
> I would like to use unicode to pretty print mathematical formulas (we
> use that in our symbolic manipulation library sympy.org), but
> unfortunately,
> there seems to be only some latin subscripts as written here:
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superscript#Unicode
>
> E.g. there are only "aeioruvx" lowercase subscripts, and there is a
> missing "q" in superscripts. We also need greek alphabet subscripts
> and superscripts (currently there are also only a couple of symbols).
>
> How can we fixed that? I understand, that it will take years, until
> this propagates to all systems, etc, but nevetheless why not to start
> now. Could you please direct me to some documents or howto what I can
> do to have this fixed?
>
> Do I need to propse the change somehow, do I need to give you a sample
> table of characters, maybe even some example font+computer program to
> show that all works? Let me know what I can do.
>
> Thanks a lot,
> Ondrej
>
>

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