[XeTeX] Combined sub- and superscript - solved

[Khaled Hosny]

On Sun, Aug 08, 2010 at 08:32:59AM +1000, Ross Moore wrote:
> 
> Hi Peter, Sebastien,
> 
> On 08/08/2010, at 7:33 AM, Peter Dyballa <Peter_Dyballa at web.de> wrote:
> 
> > 
> > Am 07.08.2010 um 22:44 schrieb Sebastian Gerecke:
> > 
> >> BUT: This just has to be an utter hack and I can not believe it is the way it
> >> is supposed to be done.
> > 
> > This hack is necessary because mhchem is not aware of font features, it's a simple LaTeX package that maltreats simple TeX fonts in the usual ways.
> > 
> >> I'm putting the scientific inferior numbers in the upper position, and the
> >> scientific superiors in the lower position. Does that make sense to anyone?
> 
> 
> The usual LaTeX way to do this would be to use the \sideset command from AMSMath, that is with \usepackage{amsmath}.
> 
> But this would be placing the usual ASCII numerals, and not using the Unicode inferior and superior numerals. Those characters are very new to the TeX world. A Google search brings up only a few mentions of them on Microsoft pages. Thus you are not likely to find a good solution having easy syntax, until someone writes a macro specially for it, for use with XeTeX and other Unicode-aware TeX processing.
> 

Actually, the OpenType features he is using, map ASCII numbers to
special glyphs designed for subscript/superscript, but unlike TeX's
optical sizes, those glyphs are scaled and raised/lowered to give the
desired size and position, and thus can't be used with normal TeX
super/subscript mechanisms. May be Will Robertson can extend his new
realscripts package to handle such situations as well, if it does not
already since I didn't test it.

Regards,
 Khaled

-- 
 Khaled Hosny
 Arabic localiser and member of Arabeyes.org team
 Free font developer