Using characters is confusing because I don't know if you mean before or after shaping. U+1C4 is unquestionably a single Unicode code point. I've heard people call this 1 logical character. Other people might say how many characters it requires for encoding in UTF-8 or in UTF-16. After shaping, some people might say it is 1 or 2 "shaped characters". It's all horribly confusing. I find using the term code point more precise.
There's no shaping involved; I'm not talking about the implementation details of the rendering algorithm. There is a D, followed by a Ž. This only seems confusing because Unicode (and - to be fair - other, earlier character encodings) willfully misinterprets the term "character" for self-serving purposes.
