Comment 3 for bug 670768

OK, I'll try to answer all the issues:

1. "in the Unicode charts, U+0192 (LATIN SMALL LETTER F WITH HOOK) is shown with an oblique angle"

In short, the glyphs used in the charts are not necessarily correct.

See http://unicode.org/standard/principles.html#Interpreting_Characters
"The Unicode Standard does not define glyph images. The standard defines how characters are interpreted, not how glyphs are rendered. The software or hardware-rendering engine of a computer is responsible for the appearance of the characters on the screen. The Unicode Standard does not specify the size, shape, nor style of on-screen characters."

Also read carefully the "Fonts" paragraph in http://unicode.org/charts/PDF/U0180.pdf
"The shapes of the reference glyphs used in these code charts are not prescriptive. Considerable variation is to be
expected in actual fonts. The particular fonts used in these charts were provided to the Unicode Consortium by a number of different font designers, who own the rights to the fonts."

Finally see the same charts in Unicode 5.0 http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/Unicode-5.0/U50-0180.pdf
The small letter f with hook is straight, it's just a different font than in the 6.0 charts.

2. "Unicode does not list African languages - specifically Ewe, as being applicable to U+0192."
Ewe uses U+0192.

See http://books.google.fr/books?id=a9v9gKCpFQwC&pg=PR6&#v=onepage&q&f=false for use of U+0192 and U+0191 in Ewe orthography, or at leasy glyph that match the characters descriptions.

You can find a few Ewe samples using U+0192:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ewe_language
http://www.panafril10n.org/wikidoc/pmwiki.php/PanAfrLoc/Gbe
http://dictionary.kasahorow.com/all/ee
http://www.omniglot.com/babel/ewe.php

3. "What is the status with the Unicode Consortium in regard to specific design requirements of characters for African languages? Are they looking at adding these African specific designs into Unicode?"

In short, the status is that this is the correct character for the straight letter f with hook used in Ewe orthography, and it is the correct character for the historical florin currency symbol.

See http://unicode.org/alloc/nonapprovals.html
There's a proposal to disunify U+0192 into a florin currency symbol and a small letter f with hook.
The proposal was rejected because of existing data and implementations using it for both, and the fact that the florin currency symbol is only there for historical purposes nowdays. So we can agree this character is mainly a lowercase of U+0191 LATIN CAPITAL LETTER F WITH HOOK.

The character category is "Letter, Lowercase" not "Symbol, Currency".

See also http://www.pentzlin.com/Variation-Sequences-Latin-Cyrillic.pdf where the issue is given as a reason for both straight and oblique glyphs with variation sequences.