"This case isn't the important one" (was Re: Visually confusable characters (8))

[Whistler, Ken]

> U+08A1 was *NOT* encoded separately simply because it was a
> letter of the Fula orthography.

And to follow up on that point, let me cite an obvious counter-example,
also from the Arabic script.

For more than a dozen years, persistent individuals in China have
been pushing proposals asking for various Arabic letters to be
encoded *because* they are letters of the Uyghur orthography.

Our response all along has been that, given the way the Unicode
Arabic encoding works and the characters which are already encoded, all
of the Uyghur letters in question are already representable
digraphically -- i.e., as a sequence of existing encoded characters.

For the full details of the analysis, provided by Roozbeh, by the way,
see:

http://www.unicode.org/L2/L2010/10282r-resp-n3819.pdf

and

http://www.unicode.org/L2/L2012/12101-n4231.pdf

Basically, the issue can cut either way, depending on exactly what
entity is under consideration. But status as a letter in an orthography
is not probative for the character encoding decisions. It is one
factor considered -- but only one factor.

--Ken