[pseingatl]

For a while, Arabizi was wildly popular and universally used on feature phones. When mobiles became smarter, it was used less. Japanese has romaji and Mandarin has pinyin. Arabic's Arabizi would increase literacy rates and solve all these digital problems.

[avadodin]

Romanization is a separate issue to using fixed glyphs.

There was a theory in the XIX / early XX century that full literacy was impossible without the Latin script but such claims are ridiculous especially for Arabic which is an alphabetic script already. China has higher literacy rates than Vietnam, for example.

I don't think the many composition rules of Unicode are really necessary, though. Maybe as an extension for academic work or artistic compositions but not for computing.

If all we had were movable types, all of these language users would find a way to write their language that wouldn't require a Turing-complete computer on each glyph. Now the Unicode gods pander to some of these computer-hostile scripts making the users of different scripts feel slighted.

[cyphar]

The vast majority of Japanese and Mandarin speakers are also not in favour of replacing their current writing systems (which give them a link to thousands of years of their own history) in favour of simplified systems. I suspect it is the same for Arabic speakers.

[numpad0]

Romaji/pinyin are widely used for typing the actual written scripts. They're not seen as alternate written scripts outside of edge case scenarios(like chats in FPS)

[throwaway27448]

I generally agree with what you're saying, but there is rather famously a simplified form of chinese that was designed specifically to increase literacy rates.

[cyphar]

Japanese also underwent simplification post-WW2, but there is important context here.

In both cases, the original plan was for Chinese characters to fall out of use entirely via gradual simplifications, but in both cases the simplifications stopped soon after the first planned stages and it seems very unlikely it would be a popular initiative at this stage. Basically what happened in both cases was the equivalent of a spelling reform, not the elimination of a writing system.

In the case of Japanese, it seems there is some regret around simplification because characters not in the 常用漢字表 do not have the component simplifications applied that the standardised characters do (for instance, 攪拌 is more commonly used than 撹拌 despite the 覚 component being the "modern" simplified form -- and there are characters with no simplified form like the first character in 艱難, first character in 辻褄, or 迄).