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Ideographic characters of the ISO 10646 International Standard
 Ideographic
characters refer to those characters with appearance associated with
the meaning of the characters. The International Organization for
Standardization (ISO) has developed an international coding standard
called ISO 10646. In ISO 10646, Chinese characters, together with
characters of other languages such as Japanese (Kanji) and Korean
(Hanja), are referred as Han ideographic characters.
4
major blocks for the Han characters are defined in the ISO 10646
standard, namely the CJK Unified Ideographs block, the CJK Unified
Ideographs Extension A block, the CJK Unified Ideographs Extension B
block and the CJK Unified Ideographs Extension C block. The characters
of the Extension A together with the CJK Unified Ideographs were
released in 2000 as part of ISO/IEC 10646-1:2000. Thereafter in
November 2001, the Extension B was released as part of ISO/IEC
10646-2:2001. The Extension C was released on December 2008 in ISO/IEC
10646:2003/Amd 5:2008.
The
Extension C contains 4,149 additional ideographic characters.
Architecturally, each character in Extension C is represented by a
32-bit code point, in the same way as Extension B.
The benefit of adopting ISO 10646 Extension B
Similar
to the CJK and the Extension A, the ideographic characters of the
Extension B contain commonly used Chinese characters collected from
various sectors of the community for the inclusion to the ISO 10646.
 The
inclusion of Extension B brings the total number of ideographic
characters contained in the ISO 10646 standard to exceed 70,000. All
the characters of the Kangxi Dictionary, Hanyu Dazidian and Hanyu
Dacidian are included in ISO 10646. The adoption of the ISO 10646
Extension B provides more commonly used ideographic characters to
facilitate the daily electronic communication conducted in Chinese by
the public more accurately and efficiently.
The architecture of ISO 10646 Extension B and later extension blocks
Architecturally,
an ideographic character in the CJK Unified Ideographs block or the CJK
Unified Ideographs Extension A block can be represented by a 16-bit
code point (e.g. hexadecimal value 4E00). However, an ideographic
character in the CJK Unified Ideographs Extension B block and later
extension blocks of ISO 10646-2:2001 requires a 32-bit code point (e.g.
hexadecimal value 00020000, usually abbreviated as 20000) for an
accurate representation.
The ISO 10646 Extension B Webpage
 The ISO/IEC 10646-2:2001 contains 42,711 ideographic characters.
More
information on the system requirements, the reference font and input
software as well as viewing the ideographic characters of HKSCS-2001
coded in ISO/IEC 10646-2:2001 or the Extension B of the ISO/IEC
10646:2003 are available at the ISO 10646 Extension B webpage.
The
stories below illustrate the example of adopting ISO 10646 Extension B
and the flexibility of its adoption for daily electronic communication
conducted in Chinese.
- The example of using ISO 10646 Extension B for electronic communication
- The flexibility of adopting ISO 10646 Extension B
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