If the character shapes are different in different parts of East Asia, why were the characters unified?
The Unicode standard is designed to encode characters, not glyphs. Even where there are substantial variations in the standard way of writing a character from locale to locale, if the fundamental identity of the character is not in question, then a single character is encoded in Unicode. This principle applies to East Asian scripts as well as to those of other parts of the world. It is well-recognized that the Han characters involved are the same, even when used in different countries to write different languages. In the overwhelming majority of cases where a Han character is written differently in different locales, readers from one locale would recognize the form used in another; in all cases, experts from throughout East Asia would recognize the fundamental unity of the character. As a rule, the differences in writing style between the different East Asian locales are within the general range of allowable differences within each typographic tradition.
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- If the character shapes are different in different parts of East Asia, why were the characters unified?
