Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Superscripts and subscripts: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 00:03, 6 August 2025

Revision as of 02:55, 6 August 2025

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:Unicode causes many complications, for example in my browser I cannot type those suffix Unicode characters and I only know to copy and paste them from elsewhere. Also searching for "2" does not find "²". The Wikipedia search treats "²" as if it didn't exist, though a regex search can spot it. [[User:Graeme Bartlett|Graeme Bartlett]] ([[User talk:Graeme Bartlett|talk]]) 11:26, 9 September 2019 (UTC)

:: Thanks for your reply. Of course we can't have all thousands of [[Unicode]] characters on our keyboards, but they are available by many other means, most ostensibly the insert section at the bottom of this edit window. And searching for "2" (two) should not find "²" (square), they do not have the same meaning. The Wikipedia search should be fixed, but it is a problem of its own.--[[User:Marc Lacoste|Marc Lacoste]] ([[User talk:Marc Lacoste|talk]]) 13:26, 9 September 2019 (UTC)

::If I search for <code>2</code> I don't ''want'' to match <code>²</code> or <code>₂</code>. The point of a human performing a textual search is usually an approximation to find a semantic match; we already know whether we want an ordinal, or a quantity, or an exponent, or a footnote, or an index; On the rare occasion that I want to find them all, I simply search for them all: <code>[2²₂]</code>. If other humans don't want that behaviour, then the search tool can be adjusted, to treat superscript and subscript numerals as "case insensitive" matches for plain digits.

::[[User:Martin Kealey|Martin Kealey]] ([[User talk:Martin Kealey|talk]]) 02:55, 6 August 2025 (UTC)

More in [[Unicode subscripts and superscripts]]. So, the font designers are dumb, but we continue to use <nowiki><sup>/<sub></nowiki> hacks instead of switching to a more sane font?--[[User:Marc Lacoste|Marc Lacoste]] ([[User talk:Marc Lacoste|talk]]) 13:34, 9 September 2019 (UTC)