Not necessarily on the baseline and the plus sign does not necessarily connect with the minus in all fonts. Vertically centers on the plus sign. This is both a Math operator and centering period punctuation character used in the Catalan language. With the Catalan and Spanish keyboards this character is commonly used as a mid dot to separate lowercase and uppercase L characters that are not part of the same syllable in a word. In many typefaces the period character maybe considered too large to be used as a mid dot in the Catalan language and a substitute glyph for the lowercase l and uppercase L would be more appropriate.
OpenType fonts support glyph substitution.
This Unicode character is not used in code page 1252 in Microsoft Windows. This character is also commonly used in text as a sign of approximation. This is not the same design and character as the lowercase spacing tilde diacritic. Vertically centers on the plus sign. This character, often called a 'caret' is used in mathematical expressions for exponents.