Adlam

[James Kass]

On 2020-12-19 3:37 AM, Fredrick Brennan via Unicode wrote:
> Often when other scripts are discussed, Adlam is used comparatively, as in, "well we want to avoid what happened with Adlam", or "we have had painful experience with this with Adlam".I know some of the issues in Adlam, but if anyone has the time, I (and hopefully others!) would benefit from a retelling of the "Adlam in Unicode" story. I know in the end it's a very happy story, but I'm especially curious about the bumps along the road. Best,Fred Brennan

(I would also welcome some insider insight on this history.)

Perusing this document might give a rough sketch:

https://unicode.org/wg2/docs/n5076-19119r-adlam-font-repl.pdf

Briefly, Adlam is a dynamic and developing writing system.  After 
publication, shapes of many of the letter forms were changed.  Which 
means that revisions were needed not only in on-line charts, but also 
the fonts used to produce those charts, and software bundles containing 
those fonts.  As any programmer knows, revision can be costly.

This should be regarded as “par for the course” when striving to support 
a developing writing system.