i hope this will go through—it's nice to have more of these premodern forms available in unicode (wish i had them back in uni when I was transcribing premodern documents). these aren't just limited to handwritten documents either (or woodblock printed documents, in which case the "block copy" is handwritten too)—they continued to be used in the age of moveable type too.
(hmm, i wonder when they went out of fashion... based on my research in hentaigana, i'd imagine that some printers would continue using them for longer than others, so you'd see variation in use depending on the printer rather than the author or publisher, but there must be a cutoff point where hardly anybody uses the ligatures in print for regular texts (i.e., excluding poetry, letter-writing guides, and fancy book introductions written by important people))
(edit: ja wikipedia says they were taken out of official use in 1900, the same year when the government issued a policy that took away all hentaigana from primary school education. perhaps, just like hentaigana, the ligatures may have fallen out of fashion before 1900 and the government was following general practice, but i get the feeling that certain ligatures like yori might have stuck around a little bit longer. maybe someone else has already researched it, but i wish i had the time and resources to either find an existing study or make a survey of my own.)
wikipedia has an english article about them: "Hardly any kana ligatures or polysyllabic kana are represented in standard character encodings." ...well, we'll see about that!

