> If there are 5 encodings for the glyph 'a', how are you going to know which one to search for? There are two possible cases and Unicode covers both of them.

> If there are 5 encodings for the glyph 'a', how are you going to know which one to search for? There are two possible cases and Unicode covers both of them. For the case of IPA `ɑ`, it is a distinct character from `a` (which doubles as an IPA) so results containing `ɑ` will be ignored. But this is not far from I want, because `a` and `ɑ` are distinct in IPA and the search correctly distinguishes them. I would have to type `ɑ` to get the other results, but this is an irrelevant matter. For the case of mathematical alphanumerics, they do normalize to normal counterparts in the compatibility mapping (i.e. NFKC or NFKD). The compatibility mapping disregards some minor differences and would be useful in this case. Of course I would like to narrow the search so that only mathematical alphanumerics match (or the inverse)---this is why Unicode defines multiple levels of comparison [1]. Assuming the default collation table, all mathematical alphanumerics are considered different from normal letters only at the level 3, while IPA `ɑ` is different at the level 1 (but sorts immediately after all `a`s). [1] https://unicode.org/reports/tr10/#Multi_Level_Comparison https://unicode.org/reports/tr10/#Multi_Level_Comparison > After all, if I was writing algebra, I'd use the ASCII 'a' not the math glyph. What I would type in TeX doesn't exactly relate to the actual encoding.