Re: Why incomplete subscript/superscript alphabet ?

From: Steve Swales <steve_at_swales.us>
Date: Mon, 3 Oct 2016 10:59:41 -0700

> On Oct 3, 2016, at 10:14 AM, Doug Ewell <doug_at_ewellic.org> wrote:
>
> a.lukyanov wrote:
>
>> I think that the right thing to do would be to create several new
>> control/formatting characters, like this:
>>
>> "previous character is superscript"
>> "previous character is subscript"
>> "previous character is small caps (for use in phonetic transcription
>> only)"
>> "previous character is mathematical blackletter"
>> etc
>>
>> Then people will be able to apply this features on any character as
>> long as their font supports it.
>
> I happen to think this would be exactly the wrong thing to do,
> completely contrary to the principles of plain text that Unicode was
> founded upon. But you never know what might gain traction, so stay
> tuned.

I guess I don’t see how it is fundamentally different from other variant selector uses within Unicode, and the ability to write properly formatted mathematical and chemical formulas (for example) in a plain text environment like text messaging seems like a fairly compelling use case.

-steve
Received on Mon Oct 03 2016 - 13:01:59 CDT

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