

These are intended to indicate secondary articulation.

A selection of fonts is shown in the below table.Ĭomparison of encodings of simple fractions Some browsers support this but not in all fonts. The fraction slash U+2044 is visually similar to the solidus, but when used with the ordinary digits (not the superscripts and subscripts) is intended to tell a layout system that a fraction such as ¾ should be rendered using automatic glyph substitution for the digits. Unicode intended to produce diagonal fractions through a different mechanism but it is very poorly supported. However it makes them incorrect for normal super and subscripts, and formulas are rendered correctly by using markup rather than these characters. This also makes the superscript letters useful for ordinal indicators, more closely matching the ª and º characters. Making fractions using existing software super/subscripts requires many characters and does not look like the rendered fraction (example: 1/ 2), so font designers provided this alternative. When used with the solidus, these glyphs are useful for making arbitrary diagonal fractions (similar to the ½ glyph). In reality most fonts that include these characters ignore the Unicode definition, and design the digits for mathematical numerator and denominator glyphs, which are smaller than normal characters but are aligned with the cap line and the baseline, respectively. Thus "H₂O" (using a subscript character) is supposed to be identical to "H 2O" (with subscript markup). The intended use when these characters were added to Unicode was to allow chemical and algebra formulas and phonetics to be written without markup, but produce true superscripts and subscripts.


