On Wed, 9 Dec 2015 03:24:39 +0000 Plug Gulp <plug.g...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi, > > I am trying to understand if there is a way to use Devanagari > characters (and grapheme clusters) as subscript and/or superscript in > unicode text. The view is that such would not be 'plain text', and therefore need not be catered for in Unicode. On the other hand, the desire for spacing raised and lowered characters is sufficient that markup to produce them is widely available, as Martin Dürst pointed out. Non-spacing stacked characters are not common enough for general support to be available. In many Indic scripts, stacking is the normal arrangement, and is supplied via a script-specific special character that is overloaded with a vowel cancellation symbol. However, font-specific deviations from vertical stacking are arranged, and vowels marks are treated independently. There is no provision for vertical stacks to have horiziontal offshoots. (Scripts written vertically are a different case.) For characters stacked directly above and below not in the normal modern fashion of writing words, there can be special characters for special cases. For example, there are U+A8EE COMBINING DEVANAGARI LETTER PA in the Devanagari Extended block and U+0364 COMBINING LATIN SMALL LETTER E. Other, clumsier scheme-specific techniques are available other cases. See for example the writing of nuclides with an explicit atomic number in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclide. The notation needs a mass number at top left and an atomic number at bottom right. A fairly general case is the annotation of kanji known as 'ruby'. Sometimes an application or mark-up scheme will support this directly. Richard.