What does normalization refer to in Unicode?

Normalization in Unicode specifically refers to the rules and processes that convert text into a standard form, ensuring that equivalent text representations produce consistent results. This is particularly important in situations where different sequences of code points may visually represent the same character or string. For instance, the character 'é' can be represented in various ways in Unicode (as a single code point or using a combination of base character 'e' and a combining accent). Normalization allows systems to treat these variations as equivalent, thereby simplifying text comparison, storage, and processing.

Selecting the standard form through normalization helps maintain consistency across systems that use Unicode, enabling them to reliably handle text operations such as searching, sorting, and displaying characters correctly. This aspect of normalization is crucial for applications dealing with multi-lingual text and helps prevent issues that might arise due to different representations of the same character.