Okay, so I think we agree that ISO 5426-2 is a character set... are you saying that it's a character set invented solely to encode its own standard document, or

Okay, so I think we agree that ISO 5426-2 is a character set... are you saying that it's a character set invented solely to encode its own standard document, or some predecessor standard? Or you're possibly saying that it was only included in Unicode to facilitate representing the ISO 5426-2 standard document as Unicode? Do you have some particular knowledge/reason for saying so? Other than your comments I can't find any evidence to this effect... maybe I'm simply misunderstanding you. I don't see anything that leads me to believe this was the rationale behind either the creation of the original standard or its inclusion in Unicode. The sideways Q specifically, like most of this particular set, seems to originate from a British Library internal character set, was included in the earlier 5426-2 set, and from there into Unicode, with the primary interest throughout focusing on bibliographic records, i.e., MARC. The bit about the difference between the character and the shape/glyph is fine as far as it goes (and does matter here as these older standards didn't really follow that separation) but is similarly true for all of Unicode.