It is possible with some other markup languages, including HTML by using ruby notation and other interlinear notations for creating special vertical layouts inside an horizontal line.
There are difficulties however caused by line wraps which may occur before the vertical layout, or even inside it for each stacked item, and for managing the lineheight for the whole line. Finally you could endup with the same problems as those found in mathematical formulas... and for composing Egyptian hieroglyphs of Visiblespeech, for which a markup language has to be defined (with a convention, similar to an orthographic or typographic convention) in addition to the core characters that are used to build up the composition, and possibly some extra styling (to adjust the size of individual items, or to align them properly in the stack and fit them cleanly in the composition area (e.g. an ideographic square). Final difficulties are added by bidirectionality Not all texts are purely linear (unidimensional) and a linear representation is difficult to interpret without adding the markup syntax inside the source text and sometimes aven adding extra symbols (or punctuation) in the linear composition, which would not be needed in a true bidimensional layout. Unicode does not encode characters for the second dimension and the layout, so it's up to markup languages (or orthographic conventions) to define the extra semantics and/or layout. A font alone cannot guess without these conventions, and even if these conventions are used, assumptions made could infer sometimes the incorrect layout. Le lun. 13 janv. 2020 à 17:16, Oren Watson via Unicode <unicode@unicode.org> a écrit : > This is not possible in unicode plaintext as far as I can tell, since > Unicode doesn't allow overstriking arbitrary characters over each other the > way more advanced layout systems, e.g. LaTeX do. It is however possible to > engineer a font to arrange those characters like that by using aggressive > kerning. > > > On Mon, Jan 13, 2020 at 10:14 AM Thomas Spehs (MonMap) via Unicode < > unicode@unicode.org> wrote: > >> Hi, I would like to ask if there is any way to create geological >> “symbols” with Unicode such as: Q₁¹ˉ², but with the two “1”s over each >> other, without a space. Thanks! >> >