Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Superscripts and subscripts

Proposed MoS guideline

Note: the content on this page is not something I made up, it's merely a compilation of guidelines from various MoS pages aimed to let the reader get an overview. jonkerz♠ 11:26, 17 August 2010 (UTC)

Which means it's something somebody else made up.

It's bad enough having these expressions of prejudice at all, without having a separate page for them, which will evolve separately from the rest of MOS as some Secret Master of Wikipedia takes seizin of it.

The first sentence is ungrammatical; the rules are largely arbitrary; and anybody who's interested in formating mathematics or music will be looking at WP:MOSMATH and WP:MOSMUSIC anyway.

Remove the silly general rules here and where you found them; and send the subject sections back to the relevant subjects. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 14:48, 17 August 2010 (UTC)

I agree. There's no reason for this to exist as a separate page: each paragraph of it belongs somewhere else. A. di M. (talk) 15:12, 18 August 2010 (UTC)

I see your point, but do not agree with your conclusion. My reasoning for creating this page was because all sup/subscript guidelines are scattered over multiple pages, this page is intended for ease of navigation. If you're interested in how to format music, you go to WP:MOSMUSIC, if you would like to know how to format superscripts you go here. Similar pages include Wikipedia:Manual of Style (abbreviations) and Wikipedia:Manual of Style (capital letters). I guess it's a matter of opinion: some go to WP:MOSMUSIC to figure out how to handle a specific music-related problem, some go there to learn how to format music articles in general. Likewise, this page is will teach how to format sub/superscripts in general. That said, I understand if this is a minority point of view and this page should not be included in the manual. jonkerz♠ 09:41, 19 August 2010 (UTC)

If this page to be used, it should itself be made MOS-compliant with regards to the accessibility guidelines, namely WP:COLOR - the "correctness" of some of the examples is indicated by colour alone, and note that coloured text should really only be used if there's a pressing reason to do so. Knepflerle (talk) 16:35, 17 August 2010 (UTC)

If you were refering to the comparison in the lead, it's now fixed. jonkerz♠ 09:45, 19 August 2010 (UTC)

Apply to article title?

Do these guidelines apply to article titles? Could it explain why (or why not)? Thank you. Regards, RJH (talk) 21:30, 12 July 2012 (UTC)

Done use the characters like "²" in the title, but don't use  tags either, instead use {{DISPALYTITLE:}} to make it look right. Graeme Bartlett (talk) 11:28, 9 September 2019 (UTC)

Lost semantic integrity

I'm pretty surprised of this guideline: the semantic integrity of the super/subscript is lost to favour rendering hacks. The real meaning is lost by using <sup> or <sub>: when copy-pasting the example wⁱx²z^{(n + 6)} [w{{sup|i}}x{{sup|2}}z{{sup|(n + 6)}}] you end up with wix2z(n + 6) while the unicode wⁱx²z⁽ⁿ⁺⁶⁾ stays wⁱx²z⁽ⁿ⁺⁶⁾. Presentation shortcomings should be treated separately (by using a different font or by automatically enlarging/shifting sub/superscript to a more visible size, I don't know precisely, I'm no expert) Plus the wikitext is easier to edit in unicode. It's not 2010 anymore, unicode support is great everywhere!--Marc Lacoste (talk) 09:43, 9 September 2019 (UTC)

Unicode causes many complications, for example in my browser I cannot type those suffix Unicode characters and I only know to copy and paste them from elsewhere. Also searching for "2" does not find "²". The Wikipedia search treats "²" as if it didn't exist, though a regex search can spot it. Graeme Bartlett (talk) 11:26, 9 September 2019 (UTC)

Thanks for your reply. Of course we can't have all thousands of Unicode characters on our keyboards, but they are available by many other means, most ostensibly the insert section at the bottom of this edit window. And searching for "2" (two) should not find "²" (square), they do not have the same meaning. The Wikipedia search should be fixed, but it is a problem of its own.--Marc Lacoste (talk) 13:26, 9 September 2019 (UTC)

More in Unicode subscripts and superscripts. So, the font designers are dumb, but we continue to use <sup>/<sub> hacks instead of switching to a more sane font?--Marc Lacoste (talk) 13:34, 9 September 2019 (UTC)

More than one year after, we're still not in the future yet.--Marc Lacoste (talk) 09:16, 29 December 2020 (UTC)

Unicode superscripts and subscripts are long gone from modern typesetting. This isn't the 90s anymore. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 21:35, 9 May 2021 (UTC)

Add exception to allow Unicode super/subscripts in COinS fields in {{cite xxx}} templates?

Several fields in the various {{cite xxx}} templates ({{cite book}}, {{cite journal}}, etc.) generate COinS metadata. The documentation for these templates warn against using templates, HTML, or HTML entities within these fields, because raw HTML will get generated and pollute the COinS data. In these cases, the Unicode superscript/subscript entities should be allowed.

This doesn't happen very often, but sometimes appears in the title= field of journal citations in chemistry-related articles, when the journal entry is about a specific chemical or chemical formula. sbb (talk) 01:41, 23 March 2021 (UTC)

No. There should be no exception, anywhere, unless these are specifically about the unicode characters themselves. If there's a metadata issue, fix how metadata is emitted. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 01:45, 23 March 2021 (UTC)

The outcome of Help talk:Citation Style 1/Archive 80#HTML markup seems to be that we don't make an exception for footnotes, and templates are expected to clean up COinS output as needed. -- Beland (talk) 22:47, 3 December 2021 (UTC)

Yeah, I've been following that discussion a bit. I should have closed the loop here. Thanks for doing that for me, and thanks for driving that whole issue forward. Cheers. =)  — sbb (talk) 18:19, 17 December 2021 (UTC)