[wgjordan]

> Did Unicode ever have any business assigning separate code points for italic versions of latin glyphs?

Here's the official answer to this question from the Unicode spec [1]:

"Mathematical notation requires a number of Latin and Greek alphabets that initially appear to be mere font variations of one another. For example, the letter H can appear as plain or upright (H), bold (𝐇), italic (𝐻), and script (ℋ). However, in any given document, these characters have distinct, and usually unrelated, mathematical semantics. For example, a normal H represents a different variable from a bold H, etc. If these attributes are dropped in plain text, the distinctions are lost and the meaning of the text is altered."

[1] https://www.unicode.org/versions/Unicode11.0.0/UnicodeStanda...