Yeah, right. I don't think the Romans would have given it much of a second thought if at all. It's only an issue from our modern perspective, preserving data integrity in electronic records is the principal reason. Whilst 'I' '1' or 'l' are essentially just vertical strokes or lines and there's not much to distinguish between them, especially so with the glyphs of some sanserif typefaces, ascetics also play a role and likely more so with certain other characters. Incidentally, here the spelling checker threw up rôle as an alterative which is a somewhat related point.
FYI, I've somewhat expanded on my earlier comment in reply to CharlesW.
Re:Unicode Utilities: Confusables
by kevin_thibedeau on Saturday August 20, 2022 @09:30PM
(#32536622)
> Imagine if you could type "II" and your text editor could offer to replace it with "Ⅱ".
MS Word has had this for decades.
But I doubt that the Romans had any clearer of a sense than you of whether "II" was one letter or two. It probably varied across eras and regions, and most people probably didn't think one way or another about it. It's probably not such a big deal to write II when you meant U+2161.
However, I definitely do agree that we are badly lacking in good software tools to help us enrich the set of letters that we can easily use. Imagine if you could type "II" and your text editor could offer to replace it with "Ⅱ".
On the other hand, font support is a limiting factor. For most purposes, II should looks similar to Ⅱ. But in our current world, you are at the mercy of whatever fonts that happen to implement Ⅱ, which might be totally different from how II looks.