I received an enquiry about
scientific inferior capitals, both Greek and Latin, which seem to be used in some matters. I haven’t been aware of this up till now, I only did
.sup capitals for one typeface occasionally. The official
feature definition does not mention them either. So I wonder how common or uncommon this may be, and if anyone knows of any noteworthy implementation in text fonts, or even samples of usage in running text.
Comments
Be sure to leave out the super and subscripts, though, or you'll never finish the font.
[...]
A lower-case letter with a capital subscript referes to the instantaneous value of the total voltage (e.g. v<sub>AB</sub>).
Then awkward people like me started coming along and pointing out that there was, in fact, no established typographic use for subscripts that sit on the baseline, and that all subscripts sit partly below the baseline: that there is, in fact, only one kind of subscript.
So after a couple of years, Adobe decided that they'd been wrong and that the subs feature should be used for subscripts that sit partly below the baseline, and the sinf feature was unnecessary. I think it should have been formally deprecated, but instead people mostly just stopped using it.
Not trying to throw stones btw. Adobe made plenty of dumb mistakes in early feature registrations, and certainly more than Microsoft. ('crcy' anyone? sigh.)
The css style would be:
With a font with a MATH table I guess.
Are there actually any fonts that hijack the ordn, sups, subs, sinf features to do superscripts of superscrips, superscripts of subscripts, subscripts of superscripts or subscripts of subscripts?