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

Revision as of 23:34, 16 March 2022

Revision as of 00:01, 17 March 2022

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:Unicode superscripts and subscripts are long gone from modern typesetting. This isn't the 90s anymore. &#32;<span style="font-variant:small-caps; whitespace:nowrap;">[[User:Headbomb|Headbomb]] {[[User talk:Headbomb|t]] · [[Special:Contributions/Headbomb|c]] · [[WP:PHYS|p]] · [[WP:WBOOKS|b]]}</span> 21:35, 9 May 2021 (UTC)

:: I'd love to be proven wrong and enlightened, but as I see it currently, I beg to differ. I doubt "modern typesetting" involves using the HTML <nowiki><sub>/<sup></nowiki> tags. Browsers just take the ordinal digits and make them smaller, which is already wrong. The Unicode subscript and superscript numerals are styled differently from the ordinal digits. Fonts that employ old-style numerals by default with descenders and ascenders (and miniature 0,1,2) use the even-sized tabulating numerals for its sub/sups. The forms are then adjusted for clarity and consistency, the strokes are proportionately thicker, serifs are reduced or even absent, and they have their own kerning and layout rules. Dumping all that logic out to the browser's HTML renderer is just silly in 2022. Sensible semantic search results are solvable problems using appropriate [[Unicode equivalence]] and [[text normalisation]] rules in the search engine. I agree with {{user|Marc Lacoste}} that this part of the MOS should be reconsidered. It is inconsistent with how most modern fonts work, produces ugly typography, and conflicts with use of Unicode elsewhere in Wikipedia (e.g. ♭, ♮ and ♯ symbols in music articles). Anyone needing to routinely type all these sorts of characters can use a compose key; it has eleventeen bazillion shortcuts by default in Linux, and there's WinCompose (open source) which gives you the same thing in Windows, instead of horsing around trying to remember loads of obscure 4 digit numbers, and there's bound to be something on a Mac (I have no idea, sorry, good luck with that). For instance, I can type ₂ using the following key strokes: <code><nowiki>[RAlt] [_] [2]</nowiki></code> and similarly, <code><nowiki>[RAlt] [~] [n]</nowiki></code> produces ñ. Anyway, I think in the last several years, there has been a lot of progress and change in the uptake of Unicode both within Wikipedia and everywhere else. — [[User:Jonathanischoice|Jon]] ([[User talk:Jonathanischoice|talk]]) 23:34, 16 March 2022 (UTC)

:::Pick any modern professional word-processing software, or other professional typesetting editors (such as [[LaTeX]]-based editors), when you select the superscript function, what you get is the regular characters raised and shrinked, not converted to corresponding unicode entities. Unicode entities have long been deprecated on Wikipedia and elsewhere, let's not re-introduce them. As for {{xt|searching for "2" (two) should not find "²" (square), they do not have the same meaning}}, it should, because both mean 2. 2 does not differ in meaning depending on its position. 2 means 2 in 22, 1/2, 3², or {{radic|134|2}}. &#32;<span style="font-variant:small-caps; whitespace:nowrap;">[[User:Headbomb|Headbomb]] {[[User talk:Headbomb|t]] · [[Special:Contributions/Headbomb|c]] · [[WP:PHYS|p]] · [[WP:WBOOKS|b]]}</span> 00:00, 17 March 2022 (UTC)

== Add exception to allow Unicode super/subscripts in COinS fields in {{tl|cite xxx}} templates? ==