[ArchD]

Why don't those digitized articles just use images? They can have any variant of any glyph they want to document.

[gumby]

It's not just the articles, it's digitization of the texts themselves and email conversations. Using characters offers the opportunity to do computational textual analysis (this allows you to do substitutions first, by replacing this character with 'o' -- much harder on a bunch of tiny images).

Plus there's no shortage of space in the Unicode address space.