I am not able to find the command to set parts of the text as superscript or subscript. Do I miss something obvious?
That is right. There is no subscript/superscript in the main editor as users generally used that for stylistic purposes, not to communicate meaning. There is sub/superscript within the citation manager because there it is a required element. There is also the option to add numbers such as ², ³, ⁴, etc. using the unicode symbols.
What is it you want to communicate using sub/superscript? I think that is the way to start figuring out how we can provide that.
In my academic context, subscript and superscript are mainly needed for isotopic notation in different variation, e. g. 𝛿13Ccollagen (“13” superscript and “collagen” subscript).
I see. Googling around for it, it seems like that naming convention is not exactly internet friendly so that just about every text on the web gets the final output wrong. That is very unfortunate, but unless that naming convention is changed or the unicode characters for all letters are added [1], we probably need to support it in some way. Let me think about how to do that.
[1] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/17908593/how-to-find-the-unicode-of-the-subscript-alphabet
You can actually do it now by using an inline formula, Use ^ for superscript and _ to enter subscript mode.
This indeed does the trick! I can perfectly live with this solution. Thank you!
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I know that using the formula kind of fixes the issue, but there is one problem: when one only sets the sub-/superscript in the formula editor, it does not export correctly as .odt and displays an empty formula instead of the sub/superscript. While one could, of course, put the entire expression in the formula editor, one would need to manually change these to correctly formatted expressions after exporting.
Just for broader context, the example of isotopic notations used here is very specific, but sub- and superscript are extremely common in chemistry and physics (and of course other disciplines). Chemical formulas (such as H_2O), exponents (for units, e.g., cm^-2 for “per square centimers”, or “r^6” for a sixth order dependence of a radius r), or description of variables or constants (vacuum permittivity epsilon_0 vs. a maximum absorption coefficient epsilon_max) cannot be written in any different way and the sub/superscripts convey actual meaning in these contexts.
At the moment, the best option is to not format these at all in the text and do it manually after exporting it from Fidus Writer.
@buerviper: Sorry for the late reply. I’ve been looking more in detail at the issue you are describing. All the examples you are describing seem to point more to a keyboard input problem. There are superset and subset characters for all the things you describe - they are just not included in common keyboard layouts. For your examples: H₂O, cm⁻², r⁶, ε₀, εₘₐₓ.
Fidus Writer does accept those characters if they are inserted. I am thinking instead of general subscript/superscript support, maybe we should have a “Insert special character” menu entry in the “Tools” menu where we list many of those characters that do exist in Unicode but that are not typically accessible in common keyboard layouts.
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