Hello Giorgio,
Nowadays, in computing, especially on the internet, icons-only fonts are really popular.
Icon fonts solve a problem on the web, namely to provide scalable icons that look great on multiple different devices and sizes with a little less overhead than SVG images or other techniques (also they can provide hinting, which other vector formats cannot). This isn't really proof that there is a pressing need of more icons in plain text.
Sadly, people use to assign these icons/glyphs in the private use area, because they think unicode is not good enough to map all of their icons.
No, they're doing the right thing, because if you use glyphs that don't correspond to a code point, you should use the PUA.
Think about it another way: If you were to design an application and want to use icons, would you really want to wait for Unicode to standardise those you want to use before you can tell your customer that you're done? I doubt it.
So, I think more should be done. Many icons are already in the unicode charts, and this is awesome, but some very common ones are missing.
Some Latin characters turned by 180° are also missing.
What do you think?
I think there are enough in the Emoji blocks to choose from. You can write proposals for icons you feel are missing but don't expect them to be accepted. I would think there is little need or proof for plain-text use of those icons. A shopping cart on a web site is rarely used within text, it is used as a button or icon and standing alone. So there is little need of even enabling the plain-text use of it.
You don't see initials handled specially in Unicode either, despite their obvious text-like form.
Regards, Johannes
