Editing Character encoding (section)

===Characters===
{{main|Character (computing)}}
Exactly what constitutes a character varies between character encodings.

For example, for letters with [[diacritic]]s, there are two distinct approaches that can be taken to encode them: they can be encoded either as a single unified character (known as a precomposed character), or as separate characters that combine into a single [[glyph]]. The former simplifies the text handling system, but the latter allows any letter/diacritic combination to be used in text. [[Typographic ligature|Ligatures]] pose similar problems.

Exactly how to handle [[glyph]] variants is a choice that must be made when constructing a particular character encoding. Some writing systems, such as Arabic and Hebrew, need to accommodate things like [[grapheme]]s that are joined in different ways in different contexts, but represent the same semantic character.