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What is the reason that in some fonts Unicode superscripts 4-9 and 0 looks different from 1-3? Helvetica Neue and Monaco:

Image 1: Helvetica Neue and Monaco test

This potentially may be because they appear in different Unicode ranges...

Image 2: table 1 from Wikipedia

Image 3: table 2 from Wikipedia

Since these characters appear in different Unicode ranges, they may not appear to be the same size or position due to font substitution in the browser.

But the fonts I have provided examples from include all the superscript characters from 0 to 9, so I don't understand why it still makes a difference.

Other fonts (e.g. Lucida Grande or Menlo) doesn't have this issue.

jsx97
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  • Rendering of text is *very* dependent on what you use to render it. How did you generate your test? What tool/library/framework are you using and how did you configure/set/code it to use the font you want? – Joachim Sauer Mar 02 '23 at 10:03
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    Checking the string `x⁰¹²³⁴⁵⁶⁷⁸⁹` at https://www.myfonts.com/collections/neue-helvetica-font-linotype renders replacement characters for superscript 0, 4-9. This indicates that Helvetica Neue (at least the web font version they use) simply doesn't provide glyphs for these Unicode codepoints and thus whatever you see is using some fallback mechanism (i.e. a different font). Note that superscript 123 are widely supported by fonts and the others will likely only be in fonts with a very thorough Unicode support. – Joachim Sauer Mar 02 '23 at 10:07
  • @JoachimSauer The example is made in the Pages app on macOS Ventura. But I remember the same issue with LibreOffice on Windows (and with other fonts) few years ago as well. – jsx97 Mar 02 '23 at 10:08
  • @JoachimSauer This is probably web font version only. Character Viewer on Mac shows me that these characters do exist. – jsx97 Mar 02 '23 at 10:12
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    I'm still not convinced that the character viewer doesn't just fall back to other fonts if a glyph is not in the selected one (because it would perfectly explain your problem!). You could try something like https://github.com/abelcheung/font-coverage (or an equivalent UI tool, if it exists for Mac) to verify if the font file actually contains glyphs for those codepoints. – Joachim Sauer Mar 02 '23 at 10:24
  • No, if a character is missing, Character Viewer doesn't try to substitute it. For example, by using the Character Viewer, I know that Mac versions of Courier New and Gill Sans have 1-3 superscripts only. – jsx97 Mar 02 '23 at 10:34
  • This is a long-standing problem with many fonts, even in the case that they have explicit glyphs. The linked duplicate includes some fonts that work correctly. If you pull up Helvetica Neue in a font editor (I'm looking at FontLab), the superscript 1, 2, and 3 glyphs are at a different height than the others in the font. It's "on purpose" in that the font designer actually put them there. – Rob Napier Mar 02 '23 at 14:52
  • @RobNapier Hi Rob, thanks for the link and for your answer there. Unfortunately neither answer the question. The key point from the link is simply the phrase "That doesn't explain why they look different". – jsx97 Mar 03 '23 at 02:16
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    Surely they look different in some fonts simply because those font designers didn't take the time and effort to ensure the superscripts in the _Latin-1 Supplement_ block (i.e. 1, 2, 3) were designed to conform with those in the _Superscripts and Subscripts_ block (i.e. 0 and 4 through 9). I don't think the reason needs to be any more complicated than that. The [poster of this SO answer](https://stackoverflow.com/a/7663610/2985643), jrturton, listed several fonts where superscripts were rendered uniformly. That's presumably because the designers of those fonts did a more professional job. – skomisa Mar 03 '23 at 08:25
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    All that said, I think your question is off topic for SO because you are inviting opinions. As a separate matter, this old question on the SE Graphic Design site may be of interest: [Unicode superscript numbers 1 to 3 vs. 4 and above](https://graphicdesign.stackexchange.com/q/66878), and [Graphic Design](https://graphicdesign.stackexchange.com/) might actually be a better home for your question. – skomisa Mar 03 '23 at 08:37

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