Template talk:Earth mass

character variants

compare:

M_🜨:M_☉ [Earth symbol]

M_⨁:M_☉ [n-ary circled plus operator]

M_⊕:M_☉ [circled plus]

M_♁:M_☉ [globus cruciger]

--dab (𒁳) 07:59, 11 June 2018 (UTC)

AFAICT no-one uses the last. The circled plus has a white rim, which is incorrect. (At least in a decent font, though some are sloppy. Unicode even has a mechanism for force the white rim.) According to Unicode, the n-ary symbol is even worse. So that leaves the first, a proper Earth symbol, M_🜨. Problem is, in some Mac fonts it's already subscript, so subscripting it makes it illegible. And apparently a number of readers still don't have font support. Though that can be fixed.

But there are other choices. M_E is supposedly another convention, though I've never seen it. Perhaps best just to spell it out, M_Earth. — kwami (talk) 20:57, 29 November 2021 (UTC)

The first symbol doesn't render correctly on an iPad for some reason; it looks like "M_䷀" (which, ironically, is the Yijing hexagram for "Heaven" and not "Earth" (䷁)). The second option looks too big compared with the "Sun" symbol. The third one is the only one of those three that is the same size as the "Sun" symbol and renders correctly on the tested iPad (and also happens to be used in the first paragraph of "Earth mass" instead of this template). I'd use the third one for compatibility since it has much wider font support (or figure out why the first one doesn't render correctly). —Cousteau (talk) 21:13, 12 September 2023 (UTC)

BTW, I believe WP has started providing web fonts so that articles and symbols are displayed for those who don't have font support. But I don't know anything about that or where we'd go to get the Earth symbol added. — kwami (talk) 02:34, 30 November 2021 (UTC)

Font support for the obscure Unicode symbol is patchy at best, so I'm reverting to the previous pending a better solution. We still have the option of a subscripted symbol though, which might be better than the word? Lithopsian (talk) 20:57, 12 November 2023 (UTC)

the subscripted symbol would either be english 'E' or international '🜨'. — kwami (talk) 23:27, 31 January 2024 (UTC)

Inconsistent template format

The use of a name for the subscript is inconsistent with how it is presented for radius. E.g. M_E vs. R_🜨. It should appear as M_🜨 as is the convention for astronomy. Praemonitus (talk) 16:10, 20 January 2024 (UTC)

Yes, it should. But evidently people have difficulty displaying the standard convention. — kwami (talk) 23:28, 31 January 2024 (UTC)