Serious problem with font size of subscript and superscipt

[Vivagen]

Hello! I should start out by saying that I adore Nisus Writer Pro; it's a great, powerful program, but what sets it over the top for me is how customizable everything is. As a chemist I often need quick reference to odd symbols and Nisus lets me set up the perfect drawer for it.

That being said, I am a chemist working on her thesis. About half of the text in my very large document is sub- or super-script. This is multiplied by the fact that the document also contains a large number of citations which also use superscript. And I am having very serious issues with the font of my super- and sub-scripts mysteriously shrinking. This will occur for apparently no reason- I will open the document and every subscript will be set at font size 8 instead of 12, for example. This is compounded when I try to run my paper through a citation manager, which involves long strings of superscript when finished. Single number superscripts will stay set at 12, but long strings of superscripts shrink down to 10 unprompted. What's worse is the processor will claim they are font size 12 even though they are visibly smaller. I have included a sample of text in which this has occurred.

Needless to say this looks simply awful in a finished document. Subscript often shrinks down past the point of being readable. I love the power of Nisus but this is unacceptable... I'm going to have to use Pages if this is not fixed, which is not nearly so customizable or powerful. Please help

[Vivagen]

I apologize for not including that my reference manager is Bookends.

[martin]

Thanks for your kind words on Nisus Writer. I'm sorry you've had trouble with the superscripts. I think I understand your problem, but to make sure, consider the following screenshot:

super.png (17.69 KiB) Viewed 8145 times

Is the problem that sometimes the super/sub-scripted numbers look like line one, and other times that they look like line 2? If so, I can explain the issue. In that first line proper typographic superscripts are used (ie: NWP displays special superscripted glyphs provided by your font), in the second line NWP is showing faux superscripts (accomplished by shrinking the font size and raising the baseline). Proper typographic superscripts will always look nicer and provide more clarity (and in this case are noticeably larger), because they were specially designed by the creator of the font.

Can you spot what characters are missing from the top line? The commas and dashes. When those characters are encountered they prevent the display of proper typographic superscripts because your font (Cambria) does not have glyphs for them. You can verify this in TextEdit, which does not provide faux superscripts:

textedit.png (19.06 KiB) Viewed 8145 times

When NWP encounters this situation (ie: a sequence of mixed characters, some which support proper typographic superscripts, and some which do not), NWP chooses to use faux superscripts. That's because the baselines for faux and typographic superscripts can be quite different and appear "ragged". That said, perhaps we can improve on the situation, either by special casing commas, periods, and dashes, or perhaps by allowing the mixed superscripts if the glyphs appear similar enough. We'll have to file it and investigate possible satisfactory solutions.

In the meantime, there is a way to workaround the issue, though it's not very elegant. You basically need to use different fonts/formatting for the superscripted numbers versus the commas/dashes. Any formatting difference will do; just something to give NWP the hint that it's okay if the bits of text appear slightly different. Here's a macro that will process your document so the font size of the commas/dashes in the superscripts is adjusted to 12.1 pts, leaving the numerals themselves at 12 pts:

AdjustSuperscripts.zip

(3.3 KiB) Downloaded 357 times

[Vivagen]

Wonderful! I think the typographic vs. faux superscripts perfectly explains why my citations look funny. Is there a font I could switch the document to that has a full set of superscript characters, say Times New Roman, that would eliminate this behavior?

It also occurs to me that the sub- and super-scripts I am having the most size-changing problems with are symbols such as "+" and "-", which would also be faux superscripts.

[martin]

Is there a font I could switch the document to that has a full set of superscript characters, say Times New Roman, that would eliminate this behavior?

Yes and no. I was able to find a few fonts that include typographic superscripts for "." and "-" (eg: Garamond Pro, Arno Pro, Minion Pro, etc) but none that include the "+" symbol. Sorry about that.

I'm attaching an amended macro here that will also adjust the font on the "+" character, in case that's useful to you.

[xiamenese]

If you use the Character Viewer, Superscript Plus Sign is unicode U+207A or or E2 81 BA in UTF-8 (check the "Related characters" area having selected +). On my system it is available at fully raised baseline in the fonts Charis SIL (A TNR-alike font with the phonetic symbols and extensions, free from SIL), Lucida Grande and Monaco and at slightly lower raised heights in a number of others including Menlo.

If you used one of those fonts you could set up a quick-fix substitution to access it easily.

HTH

Mark

[martin]

Thanks for that Mark. I forgot about the special pre-superscripted Unicode characters (we should add them to the default special character menus). There's also U+207B for a pre-superscripted dash/minus, which Cambria also supports.

Though if she uses those characters, she'll have to avoid applying superscript formatting/attributes to them, since that would double up the superscripting and make the plus/dash too small. Perhaps if NWP encounters a pre-superscripted Unicode character, it should ignore the superscript attribute, I'm not sure.