[ygra]

> They're all markups, so they all require at least some mental rendering.

Unicode maintains the position that plain text is unsuitable for this sort of thing and markup languages are preferred. That's also why there are no "formatting" modifiers except in cases where the result actually has different semantics that are important to distinguish (cf. RTL and LTR override). Overall I'd say Unicode does a fairly good job keeping too weirdness out of the standard. Emoji are obviously a much-contended addition, albeit one that already had a history of existence and widespread use in plain-text. And while you find all symbols needed for math rendering in Unicode, some of the weirder ones sometimes came from older character encodings and their existence does not mean that full math markup should be part of Unicode.

[mrmyers]

Eh, I do still wish super/subscript characters in unicode were a bit more thorough. Several times a day I randomly remember the fact that every lowercase letter in the English alphabet except q has a unicode superscript character, and every single time it ruins my day.

[YeGoblynQueenne]

My problem is still with the fonts- I can't find one that even has all of (i,j,k,x,y,m,n,p,q,r) as both super- and sub-scripts. I end up either using capitals or just sucking it up and writing X_i^r or something.

[YeGoblynQueenne]

>> Unicode maintains the position that plain text is unsuitable for this sort of thing and markup languages are preferred.

Well, I think that's an unreasonable position. The most intuitive way to enter mathematical text with a keyboard is to enter the symbols you want to enter, directly, as characters. I mean, nobody asks me, as a Greek speaker, to enter (hypothetical markup) \{greek_letter_xi} for χ or \{greek_letter_ypsilon} for υ, etc, thank the gods. Why do I have to use markup for the simplest things, like fractions and exponentials?

All symbols for math may be in Unicode, but there is no font supporting all of them. It's not Unicode that's at fault here, of course.