Unified Han

Examples of some non-unified Han ideographs

In some cases, often where the changes are the most striking, Unicode has encoded variant characters, making it unnecessary to switch between fonts or lang attributes. However, some variants with arguably minimal differences get distinct codepoints, and not every variant with arguably substantial changes gets a unique codepoint. As an example, take a character such as 入 (U+5165), for which the only way to display the variants is to change font (or lang attribute) as described in the previous table. On the other hand, for 內 (U+5167), the variant of 内 (U+5185) gets a unique codepoint. For some characters, like 兌/兑 (U+514C/U+5151), either method can be used to display the different glyphs. In the following table, each row compares variants that have been assigned different code points. For brevity, note that shinjitai variants with different components will usually (and unsurprisingly) take unique codepoints (e.g., 氣/気). They will not appear here nor will the simplified Chinese characters that take consistently simplified radical components (e.g., 紅/红, 語/语). This list is not exhaustive.