Unicode has formal stability guarantees that prevent many
well-intentioned changes. These are usually reserved for cases where any
change could be damaging.
While not a formal guarantee, we should treat all requests to make
changes how we describe, annotated or classify any long-standing,
widely-used characters as if the following principled applied: "First,
do no harm".
In this case, the maximum we could do is rate some designs as "most
suitable for plain text interchange and viewing" and explain why: the
general expectation to see this symbol shown as an annotation and the
need to keep it large enough to be recognizable/readable at typical text
font sizes might make a design that occupies a middle-ground between
full-size base line and small superscript glyphs the one that is most
ideal for plain text environments.
That leaves open that other designs might work well if not viewed in
plain text, but styled to get the intended appearance.
We might also look at the origin and if all source character sets
unified into the original Unicode had this symbol superscripted, we
could state that historical fact.
All of this would not affect shipping fonts, but might affect people
contemplating new designs. (And it might nip future discussions in the
bud - which would be the most useful outcome).
A./
On 9/18/2024 1:48 PM, Mark E. Shoulson via Unicode wrote:
On 9/18/24 09:56, Jukka K. Korpela via Unicode wrote:
Ivan Panchenko wrote via Unicode ([email protected]) :
The registered sign (®, U+00AE) is already shown in superscript in
some typefaces and on the baseline in others.
The vertical position and the size (relative to font size) indeed
varies.
....
How about standardizing the position?
Wouldn't belatedly making a "standard" of something that's been around
so long also create a lot of hassle for font designers, etc? All of a
sudden, fonts that have been perfectly conformant for decades suddenly
are non-conformant, and people have to come out with new versions. Or
what is FAR more likely, nobody cares and nobody notices and everyone
leaves the fonts alone, in which case what has been accomplished?
We'd have successfully declared some set of fonts "non-conformant",
but on the plus side... um. On the plus side, what?
~mark
