Inclusion of New Characters in the HKSCS

The Government recognizes the need for the public and government departments to include new characters into the Hong Kong Supplementary Character Set (HKSCS) from time to time. In collaboration with the Chinese Language Interface Advisory Committee (CLIAC), the Government published the procedures and principles for inclusion of new characters in the HKSCS in April 2000.

The CLIAC will meet regularly to consider applications for inclusion of characters in the HKSCS. Once approved, the new HKSCS characters will be submitted to the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) for inclusion in the future releases of the ISO 10646 standard.

Procedures for the Inclusion of Characters in the HKSCS

1. The public and government departments may submit their applications for inclusion of characters in the HKSCS to the Secretariat of the CLIAC. The application should include the glyph, meaning and pronunciation of the characters, and also preferably the usage explanation, origin and sample sentences in relation to the characters.

2. On receipt of an application submitted by the public, the Secretariat of the CLIAC will pass the application to the Working Group on Characters for Chinese Computer Systems (Working Group) for examination. Applications submitted by government departments will initially be considered by an internal special duty group before being forwarded to the Working Group for examination. The Working Group will meet once in about every three months to examine the applications.

3. The Working Group will examine the applications according to the principles for the inclusion of characters as listed below. The public and government departments should refer to these principles beforehand so as to avoid making unnecessary applications, prevent the waste of resources and help speeding up the application process.

4. Applications having passed the examination of the Working Group will be submitted to the CLIAC for approval. The assigned internal codes, glyphs and related information of the approved characters will be published on the Internet. However, such information in respect of the approved characters is for reference only. The approved characters will officially become part of the HKSCS at a later stage (see Paragraph 6 below).

5. An unsuccessful application may be reconsidered by the Working Group upon request by the applicant and upon the applicant supplying further details in respect of the characters in the application.

A list of characters not accepted for inclusion in the HKSCS (from 31.3.2008 onwards) is available for your reference. (pdf, 115 KB)

As many of these characters are assigned with ISO/IEC 10646 code points, users can handle these characters on platforms supporting ISO/IEC 10646 or Unicode.

Official Revision of the Hong Kong Supplementary Character Set

6. The development of products by software developers to support new HKSCS characters takes time. Moreover, frequent updates to the HKSCS will cause inconvenience and even chaos to users. Therefore, the Working Group will consider the practical timing in respect of the official inclusion of the newly approved characters into the HKSCS, and make recommendation to the CLIAC for the official announcement of revisions to the HKSCS.

7. All newly approved HKSCS characters that are not yet included in the ISO 10646 standard will be submitted to the Ideographic Rapporteur Group (IRG) of the International Organization for Standardization (ISO).

Principles for the Inclusion of Characters in the HKSCS

1.    Characters in an application for inclusion in the HKSCS will not be accepted if they are considered as unified versions of characters that already exist in the character set of the ISO/IEC 10646 coding standard or the HKSCS. The following unification criteria will be adopted in the consideration of new characters for inclusion in the HKSCS.

1.1   Unification of ideographs: Characters are considered unified characters if they meet the unification criteria in accordance with the ISO/IEC 10646 "Procedure for the unification and arrangement of CJK Ideographs".(e.g. ， ， ， ， ，); and

1.2   Unification of simplified characters: Characters will not be accepted if they are simplified characters included in the Jianhuazi Zongbiao or if some components of the characters are derived from simplified characters. However, simplified characters that carry other meanings will be exempted from this rule.

(Note: As a principle of simplifying Chinese characters on the mainland, there is a defined relationship between simplified characters and traditional characters. Simplified characters are not included in the HKSCS because the code points in the user-defined area of character coding schemes in computers are insufficient to hold all the simplified characters and because computer systems in Hong Kong primarily support traditional Chinese characters. Characters with component parts derived from simplified characters are also not accepted. However, simplified characters that carry other meanings will be exempted from this rule. For example, although""can be regarded as the simplified character of , the“” inis unrelated to. Therefore ““cannot be unified with .﹞

2.    The HKSCS shall only include characters required by the public and government departments in electronic communication. Only the following categories of characters will be considered for inclusion in the HKSCS.

Consideration will be given to individual characters where the use of such characters will facilitate electronic communication.

Application for the Inclusion of Characters in the HKSCS

(To view and print the application form, you need to use the traditional Chinese version of Adobe Acrobat Reader 4.0. You may click here to download the software. )

Note:

1. Applicants should make reference to the Procedures and Principles for the Inclusion of Characters in the HKSCS beforehand so as to avoid submitting unnecessary applications.

2. Completed application forms can be submitted by fax, electronic mail or post to the Secretariat of the CLIAC:

   Fax :	(852) 2989 6073
   E-Mail :	cliac@ogcio.gov.hk
   Mail :	Level 6, Cyberport 1, 100 Cyberport Road, Hong Kong

   
   

3. The Secretariat of the CLIAC will confirm with the applicant in respect of the receipt of the application.

4. Approved characters will be published on the Internet. The applicants concerned will also be notified individually by the Secretariat of the CLIAC.

Results of the Inclusion of Characters in the HKSCS

1. The procedures for inclusion of Characters in the HKSCS were published in April 2000. The public and government departments could submit their applications for inclusion of characters in the HKSCS to the Secretariat of the CLIAC. The assigned internal codes, glyphs and related information of the approved characters will be published on this web page.

2. Information of the approved characters including their assigned internal codes and glyphs is for reference only. In practical timing, the CLIAC would release the next revision of the HKSCS which includes the approved characters.

Number of characters approved since publication of HKSCS-2004: 68

Related Information on the approved characters

If you have any inquiry, please contact us by e-mail (cliac@ogcio.gov.hk).

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