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Why the display of Unicodes for superscripts of digits are not at the same height? This is specially noticeable if you make two digit numbers out of the superscript digits. Some of them look fine but the rest look out of the place with respect to each other. Am I missing something? Or is this how it is?

Joey
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Dogahe
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3 Answers3

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Like jrturton mentions, ¹, ² and ³ were from a legacy character set (Latin 1) and therefore included in a different place. This also means that lots of fonts don't have support for more superscript numbers, as many only strive for Latin, Greek and Cyrillic with a few punctuation symbols thrown in. So the remaining ones are taken from a different font over which you as an author have little to no control.

As an example:

Superscript numbers

Those are the superscript numerals from 1 to 9 and 0. The run of text was formatted in Arial in Word. You see what happened to the rest of them. Contrary to what jrturton believes, there is no reshaping of existing glyphs involved. This is just font substitution.

Community
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Joey
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    So, if we find a font where the designers have included the full set of superscripted numbers, they will have a consistent apprearance? – jrturton Oct 06 '11 at 05:46
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    That should be the case, yes. On Windows at least, all of Microsoft's recent fonts have a full set of superscripts and subscripts as well as a few other niceties (text figures), but I have no idea how insistent Apple is on high-quality fonts. They once were, admittedly. – Joey Oct 06 '11 at 07:14
  • Thanks guys! I couldn't check mark both of you as an accepted answer. It only allows one. If you ever find out which font does not have this problem please let me know. – Dogahe Oct 06 '11 at 16:34
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The out of place ones (1,2 and 3) were added before the rest (see wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode_superscripts_and_subscripts), and are from a different unicode block. That doesn't explain why they look different but it may be that those ones are actual characters in most fonts, and the remaining ones are just adjusted versions of the standard glyphs.

This appears to be how it is and you are right, it looks terrible when you are trying to make multi digit superscript numbers. I don't know if it applies to all fonts but it is very noticeable on the iOS system font.

If anyone has a way to make this work, I will put a bounty up on this question.

UPDATE

I knocked up a little program to cycle through all fonts on the phone and display the superscript numerals from 0 to 9. The following fonts had a consistent appearance across all digits:

  • Zapfino
  • Courier-Bold
  • AmericanTypewriter (also -Bold)
  • HiraKakuProN-W6 (also -W3)
  • Noteworthy-Bold (also -Light)
jrturton
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  • Thanks a lot jrturton! I will try these fonts. – Dogahe Oct 10 '11 at 13:59
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    This is a matter of font substitution, not glyph adjustment. Problems arise when some glyphs are taken from a different font. It basically suffices to check that the font you intend to use contains the superscript four (it would be very to contain it but not the other digits). This gives many options, some of which are widely available fonts, see http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/2074/fontsupport.htm – Jukka K. Korpela Dec 22 '11 at 21:01
  • @JukkaK.Korpela - thanks for that information. Joey had also corrected me about the glyph adjustment. You'd think, given Apple being Apple, that the built in fonts in iOS would be forced to have these characters, but it seems not. – jrturton Dec 22 '11 at 21:11
  • I think I can add some more fonts that show consistent appearance: **Arial Unicode MS**, **Cambria**, **Calibri**, **Consolas**, **Lucida Sans Unicode**, although I must add that I tested these in Firefox on a Windows Pc. – R. Schreurs Mar 13 '15 at 14:21
  • @R.Schreurs I think for the purposes of this question we'd need to see them on an iOS device :D – jrturton Mar 13 '15 at 14:49
  • @jrturton, I agree and the MS suffix on the Arial Unicode looks quite suspicious here, but I would expect most fonts are not OS-aware. – R. Schreurs Mar 13 '15 at 15:44
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Just to add more data to this, in some cases even when there are explicit glyphs in the font, they are put at the wrong height. (My suspicion is that this is for backward compatibility, but I don't know the history.)

Here are the glyphs used by Helvetica Neue on macOS 13.2.1:

Helvetica Glyphs for superscript digits

The design and size matches, but the vertical offsets are different.

Rob Napier
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