[selowitch]

I have long wished to display typographically legible and consistent-looking fractions in the various web browsers. So, naturally I first tried using Unicode. What a disaster! Check this out.

METHOD 1
These codes (initial ampersand omitted) for one-third, two-thirds, one-fifth, one-quarter, and one-half (in that order):

Code:
#x2153; #x2154; #x2155; #x00bc; #x00bd;

... looks like this (bad):
⅓ ⅔ ⅕ ¼ ½

METHOD 2
I also tried turning away from the single-character glyphs by using three characters for each fraction, superscript-slash-subscript for one-third, two-thirds, one-fifth, one-quarter, and one-half (in that order):

Code:
#x00b9; #47; #x2083; #x00b2; #47; #x2083; #x00b9; #47; #x2085; #x00b9; #47; #x2084; #x00b9; #47; #x2082;

which looks like this (better at least in a sans-serif font but not in others. Although it looks pretty good in the higher sizes of Lucida Grande, I haven't been able to find a common Windows font that does as good a job):
¹/₃ ²/₃ ¹/₅ ¹/₄ ¹/₂

METHOD 3
Finally, there's one really horsey-looking workaround that I think you'll agree does NOT look good:

Code:
<sup>1</sup>/<sub>/3</sub> <sup>2</sup>/<sub>3</sub> <sup>1</sup>/<sub>5</sub> <sup>1</sup>/<sub>4</sub> <sup>1</sup>/<sub>2</sub>

... which I can't get to display properly in vCode, so you'll just have to try it.

None of these methods really produces results good enough to use on a public, multiplatform website. Why????

Wherein lies the problem? With the Unicode standard itself? The browsers? The text encodings? The operating systems? Why hasn't this been fixed?

Also, please do not tell me to use inline images. I will not do that.

[Millennium]

What text encoding are you using for the pages? UTF-8? Latin-1? Something else?

[selowitch]

Mmmm. Yesterday, my codes for the fraction glyphs displayed as they look on the web. But today, with the new version of MacNN forums, they do not. I wonder if there's a setting somewhere that affects that?
(EDIT: Yep, looks like HTML code flag is set to "false").

In response to what Millenium is asking, I've tried playing with the encodings (utf-8, utf-32, iso-whatever) to no visible effect.

Has anybody else struggled with this? We have to be able to do this properly. Isn't it fairly common to want to use fractions (and not decimals) when dealing with, say, inches and feet?