There are occasions on which new codepoints were created for characters that were basically glyph variants. The greek letter koppa springs to mind: there are two glyph variants for this letter, and when it turned out font designers weren't sure how it should look, new codepoints were introduced for the "archaic" koppa, in order to show both variants and avoid confusion.
This is incorrect. The two characters have diverged in usage and are not interchangeable. The archaic koppa is used as a letter of the alphabet (q) to write names and words; the other koppa is used to number paragraphs in modern Greek legal texts. See http://www.dkuug.dk/jtc1/sc2/wg2/docs/n1938.pdf
--
Michael Everson * * Everson Typography * * http://www.evertype.com
