XPost: alt.folklore.computers
From: ldo@nz.invalid

On Thu, 4 Dec 2025 07:00:08 -0000 (UTC), Eli the Bearded wrote:

> It's pretty much never about "visual effects" although there are
> semantic differences to some visually similar characters. Math is a big
> offender in wanting ℤ meaning something different than Z or 𝐙. But you
> could argue that Japanese style "fullwidth" Ｚ is a visual effect.

One of the key goals of Unicode was to be backward-compatible with all the
different national standard encodings. This meant carrying over
equivalents of all their historical quirks.

That was the price paid to make it easy for all the masses of existing
text documents in all the existing encodings to be converted to Unicode en
masse.

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
 * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)