“Oh the bitter-sweet joys of success…”
Dear developers of RAB: We are doing more and more stuff with the Builder, and the recent addition of custom styles has much improved the apps which complement our paper magazine.
Now we have run into the next obstacle: We need superscript for many details like:
- ordinal numbers in French, English and in our project language (12^me^, 5^th^ of May)
- exponents for legal units like (500 m^2^)
- mathematical expressions (Y = X^(n-1)^)
- raised copyright and trademark symbols as per international conventions
Superscript is nothing exotic. It is based in several national and international laws for the legal measuring units; it features as part of the official French Orthography rules, as listed (for example) in “Lexique des Règles typographiques en usage à l’imprimerie nationale” and is used in many other languages.
And superscript is available in all publishing tools, not just InDesign but also humble free Scribus, MS Publisher, etc. and even in almost any word-processor tool. Just looked it up for Wordpress: They let us use 2.
We just tried this HTML-tag work in RAB, but not working. Seems you are allowing some HTML-like markup for web-links and similar. For our team it would be best if the new superscript feature would be added to the existing formatting-window, where they also find bold and italic and fonts etc.
I can only guess, but adding a superscript feature to RAB will not be done in half an afternoon.
For our measurements in units (digits only, like squared or cubed) we found a workaround: We need to find and use a font which supports Unicode positions
U+00B2 SUPERSCRIPT TWO : squared
U+00B3 SUPERSCRIPT THREE : cubed
U+00B9 SUPERSCRIPT ONE
U+2070 SUPERSCRIPT ZERO
and
U+2074 SUPERSCRIPT FOUR
through to
U+2079 SUPERSCRIPT NINE
This does not help us where we need to write 12^ka^ and 35^ja^ for our main project language, which are our official ordinal numbers expressed according to our official orthography (based on the French example).
So please add this feature to your road-map or to your “real users really need this already” clipboard. We appreciate RAB a lot and we are ready to help you with testing on real complex apps.
Thank you and greetings,
Martin
PS: superscript is so fundamental, that I did not believe my team when they told me they cannot find it in RAB. We looked again. If it does exist already, please forgive and advise how to mark it up.
Just for fun I wanted to also format my examples above with real visual superscript. I could not quickly find the syntax for CommonMark markdown - it might even need a plugin or something. But I still claim that superscript is fundamental and invite users to help me find the syntax for superscript for this forum.
