Hi Bill,

thanks for the summary.

I agree with you if purely looking at the visual confusability issue.
However, with ae vs. æ and oe vs. œ the issue is not about visual
sameness, at least that's what the IP argued on our phone call. They
said that in most languages ae and æ have the same meaning and could be
exchanged. I can only talk for German, and there it might be ok to write
ae instead of the ligature but certainly not the other way round. But to
be honest, I personally never used such a word in German.

Therefore the reason to make ae and its ligature variants would be
purely semantic. And then we have a problem: how to decide which variant
relation is stronger? If all are visual, it's (more or less) easy to
decide which visual similarity is stronger, but there's no metric to
compare visual and semantic similarities with each other.

Cheers,

Michael

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