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Actually, I can't. I can decipher quite a bit with lots of effort, but I wouldn't call that "reading".

And there are very few people around who can read all those (especially Textura) without problems.

On your other example: when I was in Russia, I found those "unknown" letters difficult, but fun. But the letters they share with Latin? I didn't see a difference.

And to your phone example: of course, I'd be annoyed. But that's exactly the point: you have to set up your local system correctly, to your expectations and standards.

I'd be much more annoyed if some web page showed an English text in some Chinese transliteration, just because the author (writing English!) was Chinese. But that's basically what you propose!

Sorry, I truly think you've run up an argumentative dead end.

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> On your other example: when I was in Russia, I found those "unknown" letters difficult, but fun. But the letters they share with Latin? I didn't see a difference.

Again, Han unification does this.

Most characters are the same, great! But some are different. Sucks for those that are different.

> And to your phone example: of course, I'd be annoyed. But that's exactly the point: you have to set up your local system correctly, to your expectations and standards.

The problem here is that for almost everything else, Unicode is a mapping from a code point (or a set of code points) to some distinct and unique representation on screen.

Except there are some code points for which that isn't true.

> Sorry, I truly think you've run up an argumentative dead end.

You are not arguing any point, other than "let's keep this historical attempt at saving on encoding space around, even though we have expanded out the encoding space so that we don't need the savings anymore."

That isn't a strong argument.

My argument is "user's don't like this, it upsets them, we shouldn't do it."

If something we do as engineers angers or upsets our users, we are doing it wrong. Flat out.

As far as I know, those "some are different" characters have not been unified, but got separate code points. And that's where your whole argumentation falls apart, unless you claim that the Unicode consortium mis-classified lots of characters.

But then I'd just retreat, because I don't speak any Asian language and cannot verify the claim myself. I can only defer to the experts, and they say that issue has been taken care of.

As far as space savings are concerned, I replied to that in another comment to you. It's not okay to dismiss Han unification as just some space saving sttempt that's not needed anymore. Space saving was one motivation, but according to the consortium not the primary one.