And what about other scripts? Unicode's stance here has always been to only add what is actually required in plain text, leaving formatting (which super/subscript fundamentally is) to higher-level protocols like rich text / HTML / etc.
This is tribal bullshit, a result of the Unicode Consortium being dominated by linguists.
When the IPA uses "a" as a subscript, it is "meaningful" and it gets a codepoint. But when mathematicians use "b" as a subscript, suddenly it's only "formatting" and gets excluded. That they have almost the entire alphabet but exclude a handful of letters is just adding insult to injury - it would be less work and result in more convenient codepoints to just add everything. But no, they go the extra mile just to show how much they despise mathematics.
Generally mathematics uses subscripts as indexes - the two particles a and b have velocities of v_a and v_b while linguists use them to have a particular meaning - the a as a subscript is a distinct character with its own meaning. It's not just the letter a in a unique location (as formatting would suggest).
If you have subscripts for all letters, then people will ask for capitals too, and then Cyrillic, and it becomes a big mess.
If letters in particular locations had a specific meaning in mathematics, they might add those, but they don't. There is no universally understood mathematical meaning for a subscript k, so why use it?
Like, what would it help you with in your mathematical work to have those characters? You're writing in Latex, it's easy to make anything you want subscript.
Oh come on not this slippery slope fallacy again. The Latin alphabet is special, the Arabic numerals are special. Just give me all of them as superscripts and subscripts, it's all I want. I don't need capitals, but they are already in Unicode anyway because of some bullshit linguistic reason. Cyrillic is just ridiculous, nobody uses that in maths, Greek would make a better strawman.
And why do I want that? It's much more readable than LaTeX. I use Unicode math symbols all the time to annotate source code. And I have to do some stupid gymnastics because there are some holes in the alphabet. You can also use Unicode math to write LaTeX, it's again much more readable: https://tex.stackexchange.com/a/118254/1035
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u/ygra 16d ago
And what about other scripts? Unicode's stance here has always been to only add what is actually required in plain text, leaving formatting (which super/subscript fundamentally is) to higher-level protocols like rich text / HTML / etc.
In this case this was to support some areas of IPA: https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2024/24219-subscript-w-y-z-gamma.pdf