On 21 Jul 2015, at 18;42, Doug Ewell wrote:
> As explained in TUS 7.0, §6.2 ("General Punctuation"), p. 273, U+2044
> FRACTION SLASH is intended for use with Basic Latin digits, or other
> digits with General Category = Nd. The superscript and subscript
> presentation forms have General Category = No.
That is was bugs me, that this kerning fraction slash is presented to us as to
be used with plain digits, that overlap the fraction slash in proportional
fonts. That recommendation is inconsistent with plain text encoding. Following
TUS, anybody who uses U+2044 must use a fraction formatting feature. I know
this from the time I'd got the valid demo version of some Desktop Publishing
software. The feature wasn't flagged by the fraction slash, and on the other
hand, the feature worked with the common slash U+002F too. It's a formatting
command like superscript or underline.
Might anybody explain to us why the font designers of Arial Unicode MS and
DejaVu Serif / DejaVu Sans defined the matching glyphs that allow users to
compose professionally looking fractions in plain text, without any need of the
high-end formatting as specified in TUS? I'm most likely to believe that any
proportional font that complies fully to TUS, works the same way. But this fact
is hidden in the Standard.
I can't believe that Unicode didn't think about this usage. If really it
didn't, the invention of the fully operational fraction slash is wholly the
merit of the innovative font designers. Why is this invention not being
welcomed?
This is why I suggested completing right this section of the Standard. This is
also why I finally decided to bring it to the attention of the Mailing List. I
hope that a huge majority will allow Unicode to complete this point.
Thank you for your feedback.
Have a nice day,
Marcel
