I don't understand. No matter what fancy things you do with superscripts and subscripts, you're not going to be able to do even basic things you need for equations like use a fraction bar, or parentheses that grow in height to match the content inside them.
At a fundamental level, Unicode is for characters, not layout. Unicode may abuse the ZWJ for emoji, but it still ultimately results in a single emoji character, not a layout of characters. So I don't really understand what you're asking for.
> No matter what fancy things you do with superscripts and subscripts, you're not going to be able to do even basic things you need for equations like use a fraction bar, or parentheses that grow in height to match the content inside them.
Why not? Things like Arabic ligatures already do that, no?
Arabic ligatures? Do you mean the unicode point for the basmala for instance? That's pretty "hardcoded", I think math requires more composability
This is interesting to me, but I am very naive about this. Can you explain, or point to where I could learn more?
I'd start with HarfBuzz: https://github.com/harfbuzz/harfbuzz
That's the open source font shaping engine. It does a lot of work to handle font shaping and rendering for languages that can't really be reduced to characters.
Agreed. I think MathML is intended for layout of formulas and integrated into browsers nowdays, but I never used it, so don't know if essentials are missing?