[hf]

I value the Unicode effort so much, I consider its inconsistencies a major pain point in my life.

Why, for the love of Zeus, is there no codepoint for

    GREEK SUBSCRIPT SMALL LETTER ALPHA

Am I missing something? Why should I never want to subscript α? I know a few physicists who gladly would.

It doesn't end there, see the article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode_subscripts_and_supersc... which sports a consolidated overview.

Tell me I'm overlooking something very obvious.

[jschulenklopper]

> Why is there no codepoint for GREEK SUBSCRIPT SMALL LETTER ALPHA?

Could it be that (quoted from that Wikipedia page): The World Wide Web Consortium and the Unicode Consortium have made recommendations on the choice between using markup and using superscript and subscript characters: "When used in mathematical context (MathML) it is recommended to consistently use style markup for superscripts and subscripts."

Inconsistency remains though, since the Unicode standard defines characters for full superscript Latin lowercase alphabet except q, a limited uppercase Latin alphabet, a few subscripted lowercase letters, and some Greek letters.

[smackfu]

Well, the real reason is that the existing subscripts are to support UPA: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uralic_Phonetic_Alphabet

Here's where they argued that they needed subscript versions, rather than using the existing greek letters with a modifier: http://std.dkuug.dk/jtc1/sc2/wg2/docs/n2442.pdf

It is kind of a mess though. Maybe it would have been better if they had named the repurposed glyphs like LATERAL POSTVELAR CONSONANT, but that's not generally how Unicode does things.

[gioele]

Unicode is not about what you would like to use, but about what has been used in the past. New characters are avoid as much as possible and old characters are allocated a codepoint only if you can show that they have been extensively used and that they are really different from other similarly looking glyphs that already have a codepoint.

Probably nobody has found enough small alphas used in subscripts and there were no electronic encodings that included it so it has never been considered for inclusion.