Despite the existence of the metric system and an increased reliance in recent years on decimal fractions to write partial amounts (such as 2.5), we often find ourselves wanting to drop in a true fraction. We know that ½ or ¾ looks snazzier than 1/2 and 3/4, like making sure you’re using curly or typographer’s quotation marks instead of straight typewriter ones.
But you can easily be stymied when typing in Microsoft Word or Apple’s Pages: Not all fractions appear to be available. You can simulate them by using font styling to choose superscript (for the top number, or numerator) and subscript (for the bottom one, the divisor called the denominator), but then doesn’t the slash look wrong?