Standaridized variation sequences for the Desert alphabet?

[Michael Everson]

On 26 Mar 2017, at 21:48, Richard Wordingham <richard.wordingham at ntlworld.com> wrote:

>> Come on, Doug. The letter W is a ligature of V and V. But sure, the glyphs are only informative, so why don’t we use an OO ligature= instead?
> 
> A script-stlye font might legitimately use a glyph that looks like a small omega for U+0077 LATIN SMALL LETTER W.

As I said to Asmus, my analogy was about ligatures made from underlying letters. Yours doesn’t apply because it’s just talking about glyph shapes. 

> Small omega, of course, is an οο ligature.

True. :-) Isn’t history wonderful?

> More to the point, a font may legitimately use the same glyphs for U+0067 LATIN SMALL LETTER G and U+0261 LATIN SMALL LETTER SCRIPT G.

A good font will still find a way to distinguish them. :-) 

> A more serious issue is the multiple forms of U+014A LATIN CAPITAL LETTER ENG, for which the underlying unity comes from their being the capital form of U+014B LATIN SMALL LETTER ENG.

We could have, and should have, solved this problem *long ago* by encoding LATIN CAPITAL LETTER AFRICAN ENG and LATIN SMALL LETTER AFRICAN ENG. 

> Are there not serious divergences with the shapes of the Syriac letters?

That is analogous to Roman/Gaelic/Fraktur. That analogy doesn’t apply to these Deseret characters; it’s not a whole-script gestalt. 

Michael Everson