[lifthrasiir]

> The consolidation effort would not have gone forward unless a significant number of people who have been studying these characters agreed that they were, in fact, the "same" characters.

The concrete term is the "normalization rules", which dictate how given arbitrary characters are transformed into domenstic variants. As far as I know most countries with significant Han character usages already had one before Unicode, and the ROK rules were (and still are being) developed alongside with Unicode.

[j16sdiz]

Except, in context of unicode, Han-Unification Rules are very different from Normalization Rules.

Some background can be found in https://www.unicode.org/versions/Unicode1.0.0/V2ch02.pdf

[lifthrasiir]

I think you have mistaken "normalization rules" in this context with Unicode normalization algorithms. I'm specifically talking about documents like [1], which are essentially more detailed and concrete versions of the original Han-unification rules.

(Note that normalization rules themselves are distinct from the eventual unification. It takes further works to actually decide whether the unification is possible or not.)

[1] https://appsrv.cse.cuhk.edu.hk/~irg/irg/irg53/IRGN2420_KRNor...