What is Han Character Unification?
When compiling a character repertoire from several existing repertoires, you have two strategies: You can unify the character repertoire, in which case characters from existing sets are examined, and if two or more are felt to represent the same abstract ‘real life’ character, they are represented with only one character in the new set. You can not unify the character set, in which case every single character that you take from a source set becomes one distinct character in the set you build. A non-unified character set is easy to build: you just add all the characters from existing sets together to make your new set. In practise, though, this results in a very large set with a lot of duplicates. For instance, if you were making a character set for Europe, you wouldn’t include a capital ‘A’ for every single European language; instead you would unify the ‘A’s found in the various national character sets into a single ‘A’. Although unification is important in all areas of Unicode, it is
