Technology developed for popular uses sometimes helps specialized uses

[William_J_G Overington]

I find it interesting how technology developed for popular uses 
sometimes helps specialized uses.

When emoji were first encoded in Unicode, Doug Ewell suggested that 
implementing support for emoji that are encoded in plane 1 would have 
the effect of helping all scripts encoded in plane 1 become better 
supported by the software developed to support emoji. That happened.

Colour fonts were introduced due to emoji, yet they can be used for 
other applications too, for which colour fonts might never have become 
developed.

I have now learned, from the agenda item Digitization Solutions for 
Indigenous Languages for the Internationalization & Unicode® Conference 
IUC 45, due to be held in October 2021, of the Language Digitization 
Initiative.

I was wondering about keyboards and how the necessary keycaps would be 
produced.

I found the following article.

https://www.pcgamer.com/how-to-make-your-keyboard-beautiful-with-custom-keycaps/

I am wondering if the facilities established for making custom keycaps 
for people who want to design and have their own keycaps for games will 
become applied as an important facility for being able to get produced 
keycaps for the scripts of languages that will become encoded into 
Unicode.

Also, will the auxiliary encoding space model being discussed for the 
encoding of QID emoji become used by The Unicode Technical Committee not 
only for emoji but also for a fast route way for encoding languages into 
Unicode, using a sequence behind the scenes of existing characters to 
represent each glyph used for the new language? That would, in my 
opinion, be good.

William Overington

Thursday 20 May 2021