Legacy characters in the basic list (Unicode 17)

A number of characters from the basic list are marked as L(egacy) in Unikemet. The types below are indications of why these characters were declared to be legacy, and a possible replacement string. By no means should users feel compelled to avoid these characters in new encodings, despite loud voices that do not represent the user community as a whole. Many of the so-called legacy characters still have legitimate uses, and for a few, it makes no sense at all that they were declared to be legacy. For example, compositional encodings of U+13152 and U+131A5 will never give a satisfactory appearance. There are no viable alterative encodings of U+131E2 and U+13403 at all (U+13403 may not only be used for hieratic but also for dates in hieroglyphic texts). And why make U+13403 (five vertical strokes) legacy while newly introducing U+143E8 (five horizontal strokes)? The proposed alternative encoding of U+131E1 is too convoluted to be taken seriously. Moreover, it very much depends on the application to what extent so-called legacy characters ought to be replaced by other character sequences to achieve the desired form of normalization. Considerations that may be valid for one specific group of users of the sign list should not be allowed to cause problems for all other users.

Users should also approach the following with caution:

https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2025/25110-egyptian.pdf

This contains blatantly incorrect information, such as use of controls that violates the agreed syntax and semantics.

Lastly, it should not be overlooked that the extended list contains far too many barely distinguishable graphical variants, as well as many compositional signs that could have been expressed in terms of existing signs and control characters. Should users now feel compelled by the Unicode Consortium to normalize their encodings, while at the same time the Unicode Consortium introduces new signs that achieve the exact opposite? I don't think so.

Various types of normalization can be done automatically with the hieropy (Python) package, available from PyPI:

https://pypi.org/project/hieropy/

Types

Some signs that are a repetition of one and the same graphical element can also be obtained as mirroring and/or rotation of another composed sign. The reason this type has been introduced is that some users may wish to normalize signs with regard to mirroring and/or rotation, except if the sign is say a plural determinative.

Characters