Duplicate characters in Unicode: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 19:39, 30 September 2021

Revision as of 08:07, 30 December 2021

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[[Unicode]] has a certain amount of duplication of [[character (computing)|characters]]. These are pairs of single Unicode code points that are [[canonically equivalent]]. The reason for this are compatibility issues with legacy systems.

Unless two characters are canonically equivalent, they are not "duplicate" in the narrow sense. There is, however, room for disagreement on whether two Unicode characters really encode the same [[grapheme]] in cases such as the "micro{{unichar|00B5|MICRO sign" [[SIGN|nlink=Micro-}} versus {{unichar|µ]]03BC|GREEK vs.SMALL theLETTER GreekMU |nlink=Mu [[μ]].(letter)}}

This should be clearly distinguished from Unicode characters that are rendered as identical glyphs or near-identical glyphs ([[homoglyph]]s), either because they are historically cognate (such as Greek [[Η]] vs. Latin [[H]]) or because of coincidental similarity (such as Greek [[Ρ]] vs. Latin [[P]], or Greek Η vs. Cyrillic [[Н]], or the following homoglyph sextuplet: astronomical symbol for "Sun" [[☉]], "circled dot operator" [[⊙]], the Gothic letter [[𐍈]], the IPA symbol for a bilabial click {{IPA link|ʘ}}, the Osage letter 𐓃, the Tifinagh letter ⵙ).