How to display the fraction 15/16 nicely in Unicode?

Question

I learned today that while common fractions have dedicated Unicode values, in order to form less common fractions like ³/₁₆ you have to use superscript/subscript characters followed by a slash. This is confirmed here and here.

This works for ¹¹/₁₆ and ¹³/₁₆, but it gets messed up with ¹⁵/₁₆. Do you see how the 5 rises higher than the one? I imagine this is because in order to show the number 5 clearly as a superscript, it requires more height than 1 and 3.

Well, that creates a problem. How do you display the fraction 15/16 nicely as Unicode characters? Unfortunately I can't use the sup and sub tags. I'm not displaying it in an HTML page. Rather, we're passing a string to a Java application that will then render these values. I know it renders Unicode values fine, but it wouldn't recognize HTML tags. Is there a Unicode solution?

Answer 1

The “proper” way of composing arbitrary vulgar fractions in Unicode is to not use the subscript and superscript digits at all, but to utilise the special properties of the character U+2044 FRACTION SLASH. You would simply type the regular ASCII digits and separate them with the slash like so: 15⁄16. The rendering engine will then automatically select the correct forms of the numbers, producing a clean, uniform look.

I put the word ‘proper’ in quotation marks because this method is not guaranteed to be supported on all systems, and some that do support it do so incorrectly or incompletely. If you absolutely need to make sure that 100% of recipients regardless of system will definitely see something that looks more or less right, I would therefore still (begrudgingly) recommend using the preformatted subscripts and superscripts as a substitute. As the other answer explained, the problem you are having is a font issue and cannot be solved if you do not have control over font settings.