On the other hand, it has been done! 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.
The two 'glyph variants' of the archaic koppa have very different semantic values: one is used as a letter and one is used in a numeric context. I think this supports the view that they should, in fact, be considered as separate characters, since both forms may be used in a document and it may be necessary, even in plain text, to distinguish them.
John Hudson
Tiro Typeworks www.tiro.com Vancouver, BC [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Anyone who has both children and house pets has surely noticed that the children exposed to language will develop language, in turn, whereas the house pets will not. - Stephen Pinker
