How to print subscripts/superscripts on a CLI?

Question

I'm writing a piece of code which deals with math variables and indices, and I'd need to print subscripts and superscripts on a CLI, is there a (possibly cross-platform) way to do that? I'm working in vanilla C++.

Note: I'd like this to be cross-platform, but since from the first answers this doesn't seem to be possible I'm working under MacOS and Ubuntu Linux (so bash).

Thank you

Answer 1

I'd need to print subscripts and superscripts on a CLI, is there a cross-platform way to do that?

Only if you have a Unicode-capable terminal, which is far from guaranteed. Unicode defines a limited number of sub- and superscript ‘compatibility characters’, you certainly can't use it on any old letter:

₀₁₂₃₄₅₆₇₈₉₊₋₌₍₎ₐₑₒₓ
⁰¹²³⁴⁵⁶⁷⁸⁹⁺⁻⁼⁽⁾ⁿⁱ

Even then you're reliant on there being a glyph for it in the console font, which is also far from guaranteed. Superscript 2 and 3 are likely to exist as they're present in ISO-8859-1; the others may well not work.

Answer 2

Since most CLIs are really only terminals (pretty dumb ones mostly but sometimes with color), the only cross-platform way I've ever done this is by allocating muliple physical lines per virtual line, such as:

        2
f(x) = x  + log x
               2

It's not ideal but it's probably the best you're going to get without a GUI.

Following you extra information as to what platforms you're mainly interested in:

With Ubuntu at least, gnome-terminal runs in UTF-8 mode by default so the following code shows how to generate the superscripts and subscripts:

#include <stdio.h>

static char *super[] = {"\xe2\x81\xb0", "\xc2\xb9", "\xc2\xb2",
    "\xc2\xb3", "\xe2\x81\xb4", "\xe2\x81\xb5", "\xe2\x81\xb6",
    "\xe2\x81\xb7", "\xe2\x81\xb8", "\xe2\x81\xb9"};
static char *sub[] = {"\xe2\x82\x80", "\xe2\x82\x81", "\xe2\x82\x82",
    "\xe2\x82\x83", "\xe2\x82\x84", "\xe2\x82\x85", "\xe2\x82\x86",
    "\xe2\x82\x87", "\xe2\x82\x88", "\xe2\x82\x89"};

int main(void) {
    int i;
    printf ("f(x) = x%s + log%sx\n",super[2],sub[2]);
    for (i = 0; i < 10; i++) {
        printf ("x%s x%s ", super[i], sub[i]);
    }
    printf ("y%s%s%s z%s%s\n", super[9], super[9], super[9], sub[7], sub[5]);
    return 0;
}

The super and sub char* arrays are the UTF-8 encodings for the Unicode code points for numeric superscripts and subscripts (see here). The given program will output my formula from above (on one line instead of three), then another test line for all the choices and a y-super-999 and z-sub-75 so you can see what they look like.

MacOS doesn't appear to use gnome-terminal as a terminal program but references here and here seem to indicate the standard terminal understands UTF-8 (or you could download and install gnome-terminal as a last resort).