I'd think that such an encoding would waste encoding space on stroke combinations that are not valid, and therefore not be more compact than Unicode in practice

I'd think that such an encoding would waste encoding space on stroke combinations that are not valid, and therefore not be more compact than Unicode in practice. I think that the TRON encoding supports vector graphics in addition to all Chinese, Japanese and Korean Han/Hanja/Kanji characters as separate code points. The vector encoding is for spelling of names (family names and places) that you wouldn't find in dictionaries. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRON_(encoding) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRON_(encoding)