Survey:
Third-Party Chinese Fonts, Input Methods & Tools for Microsoft Windows

«« Introduction      « Fonts      « IMs and Tools       Encoding Standards

Chinese Encoding standards

From the "more information than you probably need" department:

Big 5

The character storage encoding standard of Taiwan for many years, Big 5 was originally developed by IBM. It includes over 13,500 traditional characters.

GB2312

The "GB" stands for "guojia biaozhun", or "national standard". The encoding standard adopted in mainland China in 1981, GB2312-1980 includes 6,763 simplified characters. The standard also includes 682 non-Han characters for a total of 7,445 characters.

« Top

GBK

The "K" in GBK stands for "kuozhan", meaning "extension". Adopted in the 1993, GBK retained the code positions of the original GB set while packing in the rest of the 21,886 characters required for compatibility with Unicode 2.1 (ISO 10646-1). The open Unicode standard was developed by several global software and computer platform vendors, and harmonized with a parallel effort by the ISO. The final Unicode/ISO specification is a true global standard, and the Chinese authorities clearly agree. But more work was needed, as there was not enough room in the GBK format to accommodate the characters added to Unicode between 1993 and 2000.

« Top

GB18030

The standard required by the PRC government since 2001, GB18030-2000 includes over 27,000 traditional and simplified characters, with room for many more, and even contains minority languages like Mongolian, Tibetan, and Yi.

GB18030 is (generally) compatible with Unicode standards, and backwards compatible with GB2312 and GBK. Mapping between all of these is now built into many conversion utilities. When converting back-and-forth between all the old and new standards there are occasional incompatibilities between GBK and Unicode, but most vendors have thought about this for you in advance and will keep you out of trouble.

Not all 27,000 characters will be in every font (and certainly most vendors don't include minority characters in their fonts, they just support the "code points"), but every font and every application sold in the PRC must now map to this standard.

« Top

«« Introduction      « Fonts      « IMs and Tools       Encoding Standards