Re: Square metres etc. in English

Mike Clark wrote:

If you had to choose one of the four alternatives I listed in my original Q,
which was intended for GB English readers/writers - so no meters, but
metres - which would you opt for?

Given the alternatives - 10 sqm, 10 sq.m. 10sq.m., 10sqm - and being pointed at with a gun, with no joking involved, I would select
"10 sq.m." None of the alternatives is correct. "10 square metres"
would certainly be correct British English, and "10 m²" (using
some method of expressing the "2" as superscript) is the correct
way when using unit symbols.

On several occasions in the past my superscript 2 or 3 has finished up
printed as a normal number (perhaps due to file transmission/conversion?),
so (unless I'm sure of being able to see a draft of the document before it
goes to press) I'd rather use one of the ones I listed

I'd rather check, or make other people check, what goes wrong in the process. If the superscripts, when expressed as characters, do not work properly, the odds are that all non-ASCII characters go wrong as well. That's too big a risk to live with.

Even "m2", with normal (non-superscript) digit "2", might be more tolerable than "sq m" or similar notations.
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