Re: A sign/abbreviation for "magister"

On 31/10/2018 at 17:03, Khaled Hosny wrote:
>
> A while I was localizing some application to Arabic and the developer
> “helpfully” used m² for square meter, but that does not work for Arabic
> because there is no superscript ٢ in Unicode, so I had to contact the
> developer and ask for markup to be used for the superscript so that O
> can use it as well. That nicely shows one of the problems with encoding
> superscript symbols for arbitrary text styling in Unicode, you can’t
> stop before duplicating the whole character repertoire or else you will be
> discriminating against some writing system or uncommon usage.

It seems to me that Arabic is lacking two characters when using Eastern
Arabic digits, not Western Arabic. Unicode allowing the m² and m³ unit
notations, these should be implemented in any script using the same
notation. Not the whole UCS, just these two, like Arabic per cent. Or do
you have use cases in Arabic where superscript is used as an
abbreviation indicator?

I don’t share the view according to which superscript is arbitrary in Latin.
There is a medieval tradition of superscripting. If it is in Arabic, then it
would be limited to these two missing digits. Many many symbols were
encoded for Arabic, notably mirrored arrows, so adding these two is quite
straightforward.

Sad that Arabic ² and ³ are still missing.

Best regards,

Marcel
Received on Wed Oct 31 2018 - 12:19:03 CDT