Doug Ewell <[email protected]>: > > Christoph Päper wrote: > >> This is basically the same argument as for the asterisk ‘*’.
I thought it was a recent thread around here that made me think of this, but it was in fact an actual recent character encoding proposal: https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2024/24173-middle-asterisk.pdf >> I think that this is a valid use case for a registered Variation Selector >> Sequence in both cases. > > The problem is that there is no bright line in typeface design of ® between > “clearly small and superscripted” and “clearly large and not superscripted.” > Variation selectors indicate a binary option: either the “normal” or > traditional design, or else an alternative. I haven’t conducted any elaborate research on this. My impression was that a large majority of fonts opted to align the Registered symbol ® with the Copyright symbol © and the Phonogram symbol ℗, not with the Trademark symbol ™. The encircled C is almost always shown at capital or line height, the P and R are more variable indeed. The superscript style is probably due to their frequent use as footnote marker like word postfixes. A smart font could therefore treat the characters differently based on the preceding character. That’s probably an even better solution than a VSS, and certainly out of scope for Unicode. > Some fonts definitely show one style of ® or the other, of course, but there > are many others that are somewhere in between — say, full-sized and slightly > raised. Which binary option would encode that? I would have said that the ©-like full-height style should be considered the default. (Apple‘s device and app I’m writing this in disagrees. 🤷♂️)
