Project
Introduction
Project title: "The Building Blocks of ISO/IEC 10646 Migration -
Hong Kong Glyph Specification and Assisting Tools"
Understanding ISO/IEC 10646
ISO/IEC 10646, an international coding standard, is developed by
the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). It stands
for the Universal Multiple-Octet Coded Character Set (UCS). This
standard is applicable to the representation, transmission, interchange,
processing, storage, input and presentation of the written form
of all major languages (scripts) of the world in electronic basis.
Why do we need to Migrate to ISO/IEC 10646
Platforms in Hong Kong?
Coding standards for Chinese characters include Big5, which is commonly
used in both Taiwan and Hong Kong; GB-2312, which is commonly used
in Mainland China; and Unicode (regards as the implementation version
of the ISO/IEC 10646 standard), which is supported in many computer
systems. Chinese is a major language used in Hong Kong, and both
traditional and simplified Chinese characters are covered by the
well-known ISO/IEC 10646 standard. By adopting the ISO/IEC 10646
standard for the communication of electronic information, we can
prevent wrong code conversion between different coding standards
and facilitate electronic transactions across geographical areas.
Promotion on using Hong Kong Characters for
Chinese Computer Systems
Currently, most of the common computer fonts used in Hong Kong,
which are developed by Chinese fonts developers from Mainland China
or Taiwan, have not fully considered the written customs in Hong
Kong. Nowadays, computers are used for publishing and teaching materials
are almost all produced by computers. However, materials used in
Hong Kong are often not printed in the right style. For example,
¡§ ¡¨should
be the correct shape to print on the text-book, but most computers
only supply the font for ¡§ ¡¨.
In order to facilitate the publishing industry in Hong Kong and
helping the font vendors to produce fonts accustomed to Hong Kong's
writing conventions, this project has helped the Hong Kong SAR Government
to produce two sets of reference guides on Chinese character glyphs
for computer systems in Hong Kong. One of the reference guide, referred
to as The Reference
Guide of the Kai Style Character Glyphs for Chinese Computer Systems
in Hong Kong, closely reflects the handwritten style.
The second reference guide, referred to as The
Reference Guide of the Print Style (Song style) Character Glyphs
for Chinese Computer Systems in Hong Kong is for
printed character style.
The reference guides covers all the characters in traditional style
in the ISO/IEC 10646-1:2000, especially characters used in Hong
Kong and Taiwan. Since ideographic characters are formed through
components, the reference guides use the description of the character
components to specify a character glyph. Namely, if the "¤ì(wood)"
is used in the character "¾ð(tree)"appearing
in the shape of " ",
all characters with "¤ì" on the left hand side should take the same
glyph shape of " "
, such as "§ø¡AªL¡A§ú¡AªK" etc..
The key parts of the reference guides are provided in the sessions
followed.
ISO/IEC 10646 Chinese Characters and Components
Search System
Based on character glyph reference guides, all the Chinese characters
in the ISO/IEC 10646-1:2000 standard can be decomposed into components.
Our project has developed an assisting tool for bi-directional search
of ISO/IEC 10646 Chinese characters and components, namely, you
can search from a component to all the Chinese characters containing
that component or from a character to all the components contained
in the character. This on-line search system can support input either
in Big5, GB, or Unicode.
A search example from component to its composite Chinese characters:

A search example from character to its decomposed components:

Relevant Industries on using ISO/IEC 10646 standard
Our project aims for helping some relevant industries to understand
and use the ISO/IEC 10646 platform by applying some related assisting
tools and techniques. Such relevant industries include Chinese fonts
developers, media, press, Chinese software developers, design and
publishing, and some related academic institution and research bodies,
etc..
|