Editing Precomposed character (section)

{{Short description|Accented character with single codepoint}}{{No footnotes|date=October 2024}}

A '''precomposed character''' (alternatively '''composite character''' or '''decomposable character''') is a [[Unicode]] entity that can also be defined as a sequence of one or more other characters. A precomposed character may typically represent a letter with a [[diacritic|diacritical mark]], such as ''é'' (Latin small letter ''e'' with [[acute accent]]). Technically, ''é'' (U+00E9) is a character that can be decomposed into an [[Unicode equivalence|equivalent]] string of the base letter ''e'' (U+0065) and [[combining character|combining]] acute accent (U+0301). Similarly, [[Ligature (typography)|ligatures]] are precompositions of their constituent letters or [[grapheme]]s.

Precomposed characters are the legacy solution for representing many special letters in various [[character set]]s. In Unicode, they are included primarily to aid computer systems with incomplete Unicode support, where equivalent decomposed characters may render incorrectly.