Han unification is an effort by the authors of Unicode and the Universal Character Set to map multiple character sets of the Han characters of the so-called CJK languages into a single set of unified characters. Han characters are a feature shared in common by written Chinese (hanzi), Japanese (kanji), Korean (hanja) and Vietnamese.
GB 18030 is a Chinese government standard, described as Information Technology — Chinese coded character set and defines the required language and character support necessary for software in China. GB18030 is the registered Internet name for the official character set of the People's Republic of China (PRC) superseding GB2312. As a Unicode Transformation Format, GB18030 supports both simplified and traditional Chinese characters. It is also compatible with legacy encodings including GB/T 2312, CP936, and GBK 1.0.
The CNS 11643 character set, also officially known as the Chinese Standard Interchange Code or CSIC, is officially the standard character set of Taiwan. In practice, variants of the related Big5 character set are de facto standard.
The Ideographic Research Group (IRG), formerly called the Ideographic Rapporteur Group, is a subgroup of Working Group 2 (WG2) of ISO/IEC JTC1 Subcommittee 2 (SC2), which is the committee responsible for developing the Universal Coded Character Set. IRG is tasked with preparing and reviewing sets of CJK unified ideographs for eventual inclusion in both ISO/IEC 10646 and The Unicode Standard. The IRG is composed of representatives from national standards bodies from China, Japan, South Korea, Vietnam, and other regions that have historically used Chinese characters, as well as experts from liaison organizations such as the SAT Daizōkyō Text Database Committee (SAT), Taipei Computer Association (TCA), and the Unicode Technical Committee (UTC). The group holds two meetings every year lasting 4-5 days each, subsequently reporting its activities to its parent ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 2 (SC2/WG2) committee.
Mojikyō, also known by its full name Konjaku Mojikyō, is a character encoding scheme created to provide a complete index of characters used in the Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese Chữ Nôm and other historical Chinese logographic writing systems. The Mojikyō Institute, which published the character set, also published computer software and TrueType fonts to accompany it. The Mojikyō Institute, chaired by Tadahisa Ishikawa (石川忠久), originally had its character set and related software and data redistributed on CD-ROMs sold in Kinokuniya stores.
In Unicode, two glyphs are said to be Z-variants if they share the same etymology but have slightly different appearances and different Unicode code points. For example, the Unicode characters U+8AAA 說 and U+8AAC 説 are Z-variants. The notion of Z-variance is only applicable to the "CJKV scripts"—Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese—and is a subtopic of Han unification.
Biangbiang noodles, alternatively known as youpo chemian in Chinese, are a type of Chinese noodle originating from Shaanxi cuisine. The noodles, touted as one of the "eight curiosities" of Shaanxi (陕西八大怪), are described as being like a belt, owing to their thickness and length.
A Unicode font is a computer font that maps glyphs to code points defined in the Unicode Standard. The vast majority of modern computer fonts use Unicode mappings, even those fonts which only include glyphs for a single writing system, or even only support the basic Latin alphabet. Fonts which support a wide range of Unicode scripts and Unicode symbols are sometimes referred to as "pan-Unicode fonts", although as the maximum number of glyphs that can be defined in a TrueType font is restricted to 65,535, it is not possible for a single font to provide individual glyphs for all defined Unicode characters. This article lists some widely used Unicode fonts that support a comparatively large number and broad range of Unicode characters.
Chinese characters may have several variant forms—visually distinct glyphs that represent the same underlying meaning and pronunciation. Variants of a given character are allographs of one another, and many are directly analogous to allographs present in the English alphabet, such as the double-storey ⟨a⟩ and single-storey ⟨ɑ⟩ variants of the letter A, with the latter more commonly appearing in handwriting. Some contexts require usage of specific variants.
Ken Roger Lunde is an American specialist in information processing for East Asian languages.
In the Unicode standard, a plane is a contiguous group of 65,536 (216) code points. There are 17 planes, identified by the numbers 0 to 16, which corresponds with the possible values 00–1016 of the first two positions in six position hexadecimal format (U+hhhhhh). Plane 0 is the Basic Multilingual Plane (BMP), which contains most commonly used characters. The higher planes 1 through 16 are called "supplementary planes". The last code point in Unicode is the last code point in plane 16, U+10FFFF. As of Unicode version 16.0, five of the planes have assigned code points (characters), and seven are named.
KPS 9566 is a North Korean standard specifying a character encoding for the Chosŏn'gŭl (Hangul) writing system used for the Korean language. The edition of 1997 specified an ISO 2022-compliant 94×94 two-byte coded character set. Subsequent editions have added additional encoded characters outside of the 94×94 plane, in a manner comparable to UHC or GBK.
A variant form is an alternate glyph for a character, encoded in Unicode through the mechanism of variation sequences: sequences in Unicode that consist of a base character followed by a variation selector character.
CJK Unified Ideographs Extension B is a Unicode block containing rare and historic CJK ideographs for Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese submitted to the Ideographic Research Group between 1998 and 2000, plus seven gongche characters for kunqu added in Unicode 13.0, and two characters for the Macao Supplementary Character Set added in Unicode 14.0.
CJK Unified Ideographs Extension C is a Unicode block containing rare and historic CJK ideographs for Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese submitted to the Ideographic Research Group between 2002 and 2006, plus five "urgently needed" characters added in Unicode versions 14.0 and 15.0, some of which had previously been mistakenly unified with other characters.
CJK Unified Ideographs Extension D is a Unicode block containing uncommon CJK ideographs for Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese, some of which are in current use. Much smaller than most Unicode blocks for CJK unified ideographs, Extension D consists of characters which were submitted to the Ideographic Research Group as "urgently needed characters" between 2006 and 2009. Characters submitted during the same period which were needed less urgently were included in CJK Unified Ideographs Extension E instead.
CJK Compatibility Ideographs is a Unicode block created to contain mostly Han characters that were encoded in multiple locations in other established character encodings, in addition to their CJK Unified Ideographs assignments, in order to retain round-trip compatibility between Unicode and those encodings. However, it also contains 12 unified ideographs sourced from Japanese character sets from IBM.
CJK Unified Ideographs Extension E is a Unicode block containing rare and historic CJK ideographs for Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese submitted to the Ideographic Research Group between 2006 and 2013, excluding the characters submitted as "urgently needed" between 2006 and 2009, which were included in CJK Unified Ideographs Extension D.
CJK Unified Ideographs Extension F is a Unicode block containing rare and historic CJK ideographs for Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese, as well as more than a thousand Sawndip characters for writing the Zhuang language, which were submitted to the Ideographic Research Group between 2012 and 2015.
CJK Unified Ideographs Extension I is a Unicode block comprising CJK Unified Ideographs included in drafts of an amendment to China's GB 18030 standard circulated in 2022 and 2023, which were fast-tracked into Unicode in 2023.
