Thanks for bringing up Sumerian (better: Sumero-Akkadian Cuneiform). I
was thinking along exactly those lines. For me at least, solutions that
satisfy 'the majority' are no solutions at all. And obviously, I'm not
alone. 

(Though it could well be that I missed the intent of Thierry's comment
and am barking up the wrong tree.) 

K

>>> erik quanstrom <quanstro@quanstro.net> 06/27/11 8:36 AM >>>
> But I don't want to have the obligation to "know" 65536 signs to
> express what I want to express. I'm sorry, but I think that the
> main majority (remember that for latin1/latin2 accented letters
> are just variants so need less "user memory" than plain different
> characters) can do with (less than) 256 signs blocks, and switch
> fonts when "speaking" about special things (the switch can be
> automatic by the way). As far as TeX is concerned, all the control
> codepoints (positions) are useless in the fonts. There is still
> availbale room even if for the latin1 encoded tfm built for (next)
> kerTeX from PostScript core.

there are currently 0x10ffff+1 codepoints (1114112), not 65536,
but only 23669 + the large chinese blocks are currently defined.

but anyway, i think you are missing the point.  every one of those
codepoints is used, or was used in human written communication.
the fact that you or i probablly don't know them all is beside the
point entirely.

there are 600000 words in the oxford english dictionary.  i don't
know them all.  let's suppose i had the power to eliminate all
the ones that i don't know.  wouldn't that be a horrible idea?
then i would not be able to learn any new words.  odious.

so with unicode.  if you strip out all the languages you don't know
by restricting yourself to the latin1 codepoints [0, 256), then you
can't easily add, say, greek or sumerian codepoints should you or
anyone else need them.

since, as you can see, there is a 1:1 identity mapping between latin1
and unicode codepoints [0, 256), i don't see why one wouldn't
give oneself the option to increase this subset to cover more ground.
i use alphas, arrows, math symbols, etc. quite often in code.  and
even more often when i used to use tex.  it's really quite a drag to
read \alpha instead of “α.”

> Does a whole Unicode "Times-Roman" font makes sense? Ideograms in
> "Times-Roman"?

i get confused on terms.  i think the right term is typeface.
extended fonts collections of a given typeface covering very
wide sections of unicode do exist and are sold by the major
font vendors.

i don't think that it's too hard to imagine that one can make
most symbols look compatable enough.  in fact, i'm using a font
with ~32000 glyphs on my plan 9 terminal right now.

and there's no penalty for having that many glyphs.  it just
means that my font file as a couple hundred subfonts.  these
are only open if needed.  typically only 3 subfonts are open
at any one time.

- erik