All things aside though, Han unification [1] remains the worst part of Unicode to me as it makes it impossible to know whether the glyph I am seeing is the one intended by whoever wrote the text (Chinese names in e-mails for example is an utter mess for someone like me that has to have their system set up to mostly handle English and Japanese). The whole Han unification mess more or less necessitates markup and sometimes even the insertions of raster image glyphs for historical and regional texts which is just bloody daft. Yes, Unicode language markers do exist and can resolve this in part. But, they are invisible to the end user, can disappear while copying and pasting, and you have to rely on the original author even putting them there in the first place! Whenever someone struggles to see the issue, I usually propose that we unify the common subsets of the Cyrillic, Greek, Latin, and Mathematical glyphs which usually finally drives home the point.
That would be an awesome compact encoding scheme (and also help with the next 4million emojis)! And given the relatively higher importance of those CyrGrLat, it would force wider proper support that would resolve the issues you raised, which are all app-dependent
> But, they are invisible to the end user
Apps make them visible, some even do that for whitespace chars to highlight the difference
> can disappear while copying and pasting
broken clipboards can be fixed? They somehow manage to retain rich text formatting, surely they cna retain language markers?
> you have to rely on the original author even putting them there in the first place!
Nope, the author's input app can handle that just like the original author doesn't need invisible joiners to use composed emojis