6.10.2016, 19:27, Ken Whistler wrote:
Their functions have been completely overtaken by markup conventions such as <sub>...</sub> and <sup>...</sup>, which *are* widely supported already, even in most email clients, ri^ght out of the b_ox .
They are widely supported, but very widely in a typographically inferior way. This is essential especially when it comes to things like “3ème”, where one might want to display the letters in superscript style as a matter of typography-
And I suspect that Yucca's statement "so it would usually be best to give up the superscripting idea here" is intended to mean give up on asking for a separately encoded superscript character for each Latin letter, including accented ones
Not quite. Adding superscript characters for all Latin letters is not a good idea at all, but I was not referring that. Instead, I suggested that in a case like “3ème”, it’s best to give up the idea of superscripting the letters using any techniques available now (including e.g. <sup> markup), in most situations. Flat rendering of “3ème” is better than a typographically poor rendering with superscripts.
Because, after all, this stuff already just works: «3^ème » (and not «3ᵉ̀ᵐᵉ», by the way!).
It works for a rather limited range of values for “works”. I’m not sure what happens in my reply... it seems that Thunderbird does something funny here. Anyway, what I saw in my Thunderbird is what I usually see when <sup> is used: “ème” in slightly reduced font in elevated position, messing up line spacing, and looking rather different from superscript glyphs designed by a typographer.
Independently of the technique used to ask software to show something as a superscript (e.g. using a superscript character code point in Unicode, using <sup>, using superscript formatting in a word processor, or using ^{...} in TeX), typographically accepted rendering must use a superscript glyph, designed by a typographer to match the overall style of the font, or maybe a sophisticated algorithm that constructs the rendering from a normal glyph.
In a sense, superscript code points make this easier: the rendering can simply pick up the corresponding glyph for the font – if it has one (a big “if”). But this is not a good argument in favor of adding such points en masse. It is, however, a good argument in favor of using existing superscript code points, like “²”, with good font support.
Yucca
