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Unicode afaik focuses on taking already existing & supported character encodings, and incorporates those. Given there are 10,000 distinct glyphs, without some
by mcphage 4y ago
Unicode afaik focuses on taking already existing & supported character encodings, and incorporates those. Given there are 10,000 distinct glyphs, without some group of people already pushing for a specific encoding because it's what they use, Unicode probably doesn't have that strong a motivation to create their own (only to find out that it doesn't meet the needs of real users).
- WorldMaker 4y agoAt least Unicode today doesn't need 10,000 codepoints to encode 10,000 distinct glyphs. Cistercian might make sense of ZWJ sequences of existing numerals plus a "cistercian mode selector". Authoring font ligatures to support that might not be fun, though, but also the cistercian glyphs are pretty simple concatenative structures almost perfectly designed for simple ligatures.
- mcphage 4y agoYou're right, that does seem a better way to encode these—but that kind of encoding design I believe Unicode is wary of doing themselves. They seem to prefer sticking with a community-picked encoding instead.
- WorldMaker 4y agoYes, I don't have an answer for that part and it makes sense of course, there's no reason to design an encoding that no one expects to use. On the other hand, the above design idea (ZWJ sequences of arabic numerals with a "mode" marker) is offered free to anyone that does think they have a use for these numerals in Unicode and wants to turn it into a proper proposal.