There are limitations and drawbacks.

• It's hard to name most characters. "I have a problem with invoice latin-small-letter-a-with-dot-above-and-macron;devanagari-letter-vocalic-r;left-right-white-arrow." (ǡऋ⬄)
• There are font problems ("I have a problem with invoice box-box-box.")
• Encoding problems are still common too.

What symbols are you suggesting?

• You'd need a set of 22 chars to maintain a record num of 5 chars. (22⁵ = 5,153,632).
• You'd need a set of 48 chars to bring the record num down to 4 chars. (48⁴ = 5,308,416).
• You'd need a set of 171 chars to bring the record num down to 3 chars. (171³ = 5,000,211).

I suppose you could use the horizontal dominoes. Each domino can be read as two digits from 0 to 6. For example, this is node 🀷🁜🁑🀵 (06:61:44:04₇).

Using dominoes would reduce the record num to 4 chars (7²⁴ = 5,764,801) assuming you didn't want the sequence to be a legal domino sequence. Both the UTF-8 and the UTF-16 encoding of 4 dominoes would take 16 bytes. (UTF-32 too, for what it's worth.)

Update: Added everything after the question.

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