Overall, typographic innovations like all typography are better the less they stand out yet do their work. At least in somewhat academic text with references and notation subscripting appears to blend right in. I suspect the strength of the proposal is that one can flexibly apply it for readers and tone: sometimes it makes sense to say “I~2020~ thought”, sometimes “I thought in 2020″.
I am seriously planning to use it for inflation adjustment in my book, and may (publisher and test-readers willing) apply it more broadly in the text.
Yes, this relies heavily on the fact that subscripts are small/compact and can borrow meaning from their STEM uses. Doing it as superscripts, for example, probably wouldn’t work as well, because we don’t use superscripts for this sort of thing & already use superscripts heavily for other things like footnotes, while some entirely new symbol or layout is asking to fail & would make it harder to fall back to natural language. (If you did it as, say, a third column, or used some sort of 2-column layout like in some formal languages.)
How are you doing inflation adjustment? I mocked up a bunch of possibilities and I wasn’t satisfied with any of them. If you suppress one of the years, you risk confusing the reader given that it’s a new convention, but if you provide all the variables, it ensure comprehension but is busy & intrusive.
Overall, typographic innovations like all typography are better the less they stand out yet do their work. At least in somewhat academic text with references and notation subscripting appears to blend right in. I suspect the strength of the proposal is that one can flexibly apply it for readers and tone: sometimes it makes sense to say “I~2020~ thought”, sometimes “I thought in 2020″.
I am seriously planning to use it for inflation adjustment in my book, and may (publisher and test-readers willing) apply it more broadly in the text.
Yes, this relies heavily on the fact that subscripts are small/compact and can borrow meaning from their STEM uses. Doing it as superscripts, for example, probably wouldn’t work as well, because we don’t use superscripts for this sort of thing & already use superscripts heavily for other things like footnotes, while some entirely new symbol or layout is asking to fail & would make it harder to fall back to natural language. (If you did it as, say, a third column, or used some sort of 2-column layout like in some formal languages.)
How are you doing inflation adjustment? I mocked up a bunch of possibilities and I wasn’t satisfied with any of them. If you suppress one of the years, you risk confusing the reader given that it’s a new convention, but if you provide all the variables, it ensure comprehension but is busy & intrusive.