I'm working with an application that accepts an XML document as input and renders a PDF, the implementation of which is encapsulated in a closed source library. The content of the document is very science-y, so often I reach to inline Unicode to print uncommon characters in strings of text as the document is UTF-8 encoded. For example:
<pdf:Label text="1+1 ≤ 2 ≤ 3-1"></pdf:Label>
Would render in the PDF as 1+1 ≤ 2 ≤ 3-1. This works great, however, I've been tasked to implement new notation that UTF-8 has no code points for... namely subscripts of some a-z letters. While I understand the reason these code points aren't standardized are rooted in linguistics, I'm required to preserve the original notation because it has domain context... a term in the formula on my document would be assumed to be the same "thing" across the industry, if that makes sense.
Is there anything I can do to render these subscripts, or a work around to appear the same? I tried shrinking the font and it doesn't have the same effect. Offsetting one character down pushes the whole next line down and line spacing is inconsistent. Re-inventing the wheel for this isn't going to be an option.