Re: [css3-fonts] subscript/superscript variants

On 09/05/12 5:14 AM, Tab Atkins Jr. wrote:

> Not *necessarily*. I think it's reasonable to expect that fonts might 
> have letters so that you can do superscripts of 'st' or 'nd' or 'th', 
> right? You say that sup/sub punctuation is rarely included - what 
> about spaces? ~TJ 

The most common set of superscript and subscript variants for OpenType 
fonts is probably

     Superscript
     a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z
     1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0

     Subscript
     1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0

Some font makers also include superscript é, but this is based on a 
misunderstanding of French ordinal practice, so isn't very common.

Anything beyond these sets would be considered specialist usage. So, for 
example, the Brill fonts for academic publishing include a full set of 
both upper- and lowercase Latin and Greek alphabets in superscript form, 
and these are commonly used in the apparatus critici of scholarly editions.

Some fonts might make a distinction in height between supscripts 
accessed via the <subs> feature and those accessed via the <sinf> 
feature, but this is due to a misapprehension in the original 
registration of these two features, and use of the <sinf> feature is 
discouraged, with <subs> expected to provide the usual alignment for 
scientific subsripts in e.g. H₂O (presuming it has not been explicitly 
encoded as a subscript character, as in this illustration).


JH