@SnoopJ @rotopenguin Well, for example, if the people of China decide to invent a new hanzi, effectively now they just can't

Or they can, but they have to ask someone for permission. They'd have to do some complex set of steps with a PUA codepoint. Before computer encoding they could just draw it

@mcc @rotopenguin nothing stops them from doing it and not encoding it (e.g. seal forms) but sure the reality is that someone's gonna want to put the thing on the computer at some point, and someone's gonna be in charge of that encoding. Not sure that problem has any solution other than "fuck it all text is purely graphical now"

I'd point to U+32FF SQUARE ERA NAME REIWA as an example of UTC acting in good faith here, but I don't follow along very closely with the massive volume of communication with their colleagues working on standards bodies in China. What I have read makes it seem like a pretty good working relationship

@SnoopJ @mcc @rotopenguin there is the option of looking at how folks actually go about composing new characters out of existing ones (already a thing people study) and construct an encoding for that.

that wouldn’t give complete flexibility, but it could be similar to what alphabetic language users have.

@tryst @mcc @rotopenguin it's also something Unicode already has, for languages where it is clear how to specify it without making a mess (e.g. the Hangul Jamo block and associated combiner semantics)

As the ligature above demonstrates, this is a hard problem, and almost always harder than one thinks