Relation to ISO 10646 Standard

The Government has submitted HKSCS to the Ideograph Rapporteur Group (IRG), a working group under ISO, for inclusion in the ISO 10646 international coding standard. The current version of the ISO 10646 standard contains 4,783 of the 4,818 characters in the HKSCS-2001 version. The remaining 35 special symbols and character radicals are placed in the Private User-defined Area (PUA) of the ISO 10646 standard. They will be considered by the ISO for inclusion in future releases of the ISO 10646 standard.

The ISO 10646 standard is widely adopted by popular operating systems, database software, office automation (OA) suites, web browsers, e-mail clients and input devices. With the HKSCS-2001 included in the future releases of ISO 10646 standard, users of popular computer products, which adopt the ISO 10646 standard, will be able to use Chinese characters contained in the HKSCS-2001.