> From: John H. Jenkins [mailto:jenkins@...]

> > This surely does seem to be getting into the matter of Unicode's
> > definitions, versus rendering details independent of Unicode. At the
> > moment, I'm thinking that including super and sub numerals was a
> > "concession" or a convenience that does not strictly follow

Unicode's

> > primary intent; might well be wrong on that.
>
> You are quite correct. The super- and subscript forms included in
> Unicode are really only there for compatibility with earlier standards
> and are insufficient for more than the simplest real-world use.

This particular case is not quite so simple: superscript and, to a
lesser extent, subscript forms are used in phonetic transcriptions where
the super-/sub-scripting is semantically significant, and something that
needs to be retained in plain text. The first super-/sub-script forms
that were added to Unicode were added for compatibility with
pre-existing standards, but others have been added since for reasons
other than compatibility with pre-existing standards.



Peter Constable