On Sun, 16 Jan 2005 20:14:41 -0000, Richard Wordingham
<richard.wordingham@...> wrote:

{Nice material deleted}

> However, although it has 'invisible times' U+2062 and 'invisible
> separator' U+2063, there is no mechanism for forming subscripts!

Well, humans defined it, and they can have human weaknesses. Nevertheless,
I found Unicode quite inspiring when I first studied it. The song on the
CD in the 3.0 book is really quite lovely, btw.

> The use of subscript digits in XML documents 'is discouraged'.

Disgusting. Are XML and chemical formulae mutually exclusive? Utter
ignorance of chemistry, or else I'm missing something. It can't be
ignorance of typography. In-line valence numbers (I don't know the usual
term) look as bad as, say, capital deltas substituted for O's.

> Unicode for Maths is discussed at http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr25/ .

Thanks!

> On the other hand IF your browser/font supports it, you can write base
> 10 vulgar fractions to your heart's content - use fractional slash
> U+2044! (It failed for IE 6.0, but maybe that's because I wasn't using
> the right font.) You can only use digits, and that concept excludes
> subscript digits.

Goodie!

Sample text:

355⁄113 is a remarkably-good approximation to π. ... /⁄ <-- comparison
... Trying letters: a⁄b vs. a/b. ... Nice!

Recent versions of Opera have a very-nice feature that needs some care,
because it was not part of the mainstream development. In the e-mail
composer, type in the hex Unicode [code point number], poke (left) Alt-x,
and if the char. exists in your composer font (which is selectable: Alt-P

> Fonts), it will render. It's easier to type a space code before the hex

number so the conversion doesn't "reach back too far". Not sure whether it
goes beyond the BMP. Of course, in Win, Right Alt (or Alt Gr), held down
while entering the decimal code, also enters (essentially?) anything in
the font.

Btw, easy way to remember 355 ⁄ 113: Mentally (or physically) write the
first odd integers, each twice: 11 33 55.
Rearrange: 113 355. Rearrange, again: 355⁄113. Fun. As to that
"remarkably-good": No numerator smaller than 104348 gives a better
approximation; complete form is 104348 ⁄ 33215.

--
Nicholas Bodley /*|*\ Waltham, Mass.
The curious hermit -- autodidact and polymath
<http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0110-33.htm>
Total lie -- saying that SocialSecurity is in crisis.