On 2018-10-30, James Kass via Unicode <[email protected]> wrote: > (Still responding to Ken Whistler's post) .... > Do you know the difference between H₂SO₄ and H2SO4? One of them is a > chemical formula, the other one is a license plate number. T̲h̲a̲t̲ is > not a stylistic difference /in my book/. (Emphasis added.)
Yes. In chemical notation, sub/superscripting is semantically significant. That's not the case for abbreviations: the choice of Mr or any of its superscripted and decorated variations is not semantically significant. The English abbreviation Mr was also frequently superscripted in the 15th-17th centuries, and that didn't mean anything special either - it was just part of a general convention of superscripting the final segment of abbreviations, probably inherited from manuscript practice. > But suppose both those strings were *intended* to represent the chemical > formula? Then one of them would be optimally correct; the other one... meh. > > Now what if we were future historians given the task of encoding both of > those strings, from two different sources, and had no idea what those > two strings were supposed to represent? Wouldn't it be best to preserve > both strings intact, as they were originally written? Indeed - and that means an image, not any textual representation. The typeface might be significant too. -- The University of Edinburgh is a charitable body, registered in Scotland, with registration number SC005336.
