A composed character sequence is typically made up of a base letter, which occupies a single space, and one or more non-spacing marks, which are rendered in the same space as the base letter. The Unicode Standard specifies the order of characters used to create a composite character. The base character comes first, followed by one or more non-spacing marks. If they do, order is important. The Unicode Standard specifies how successive non-spacing characters are applied to a base character.
Precomposed characters are another option for some composite characters.
Each precomposed character is represented by a single code point rather than two or more code points which may combine during rendering. Precomposed characters may be decomposed for consistency or analysis. This allows easy alphabetical sorting for languages where character modifiers do not affect alphabetical order. The Unicode Standard defines decomposition for all precomposed characters. It also defines Normalization Forms , that provide for unique representations of characters.