From: Jill Ramonsky > Thanks for your highly constructive email. I'd be quite happy then to > support the addition of just one single new Unicode character then > (instead of six) - as in your ligature idea, which above I called > DIGIT COMBINING LIGATURE. This would seem to solve > everything (pending your answer to my proviso).
Another solution could be a formatting control that overrides the interpretation of a sequence of characters as digits rather than as letters (in a way similar to what is used, and sometimes written with a plain symbol, in other scripts where both digits and letters are written with the same glyph). Its effect and applicability would be similar to the RLM and LRM controls used to override a default directionality property, instead of the numeric property... Here I just suggested a few things for your problem of natural sort or semantic analysis, but I don't need it and I won't defend this idea. It's up to you to defned your opinion and make an alternate proposal for WG2. Clearly you take your distance from the other very problematic proposal to encode figure-width letters...
