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    The Government today (May 22) released the latest version of the Hong Kong Supplementary Character Set (HKSCS) document to facilitate computer input of special Chinese characters for electronic communication.

    The HKSCS contains two coding schemes for special characters that are used in the local community and the Government to describe names of people, places, scientific terms, or Cantonese dialects. The HKSCS-2004 contains 4,941 characters, 123 of which are in addition to those contained in the last release of the HKSCS in 2001.

    All these characters have adopted the Big-5 and ISO 10464 encoding schemes, which are aligned with the international coding standard ISO/IEC 10646:2003 and Amendment 1 developed by the International Organisation for Standardisation (ISO).

    A spokesman for the Office of the Government Chief Information Officer (OGCIO) said that the Government was committed to promoting an open and common Chinese language interface to facilitate electronic communication in Chinese under the Digital 21 Strategy for IT development.

    "A pivotal element of this open and common Chinese language interface is the adoption of the ISO 10646 coding standard and the HKSCS so as to address the problems arising from the existence of different coding standards and insufficient characters in some Chinese character sets used on computers.

    "We hope that the community will widely adopt the HKSCS for their electronic communication in Chinese. This will, in turn, encourage the development of more IT products that are compatible with the ISO 10646 standard and HKSCS," the spokesman said.

    Jointly promulgated by the OGCIO, the Official Languages Division of the Civil Service Bureau and the Chinese Language Interface Advisory Committee, all the characters in the HKSCS-2004 have been accepted by the ISO for inclusion in the coming release of the ISO 10646 international coding standard.

    Furthermore, the HKSCS-2004 has adopted the "Reference Guide on Song Style (Print Style) Character Glyphs for Chinese Computer Systems in Hong Kong", published by the Government in February 2002, for compiling the character glyphs.

    A reference document, "Indexing System by Radicals", which includes a radical table, a character index and a special character index, is also published today to allow search of characters in the HKSCS-2004 by means of radicals. The document is available for download at: www.info.gov.hk/digital21/eng/hkscs/download.html.

    For further information about the HKSCS-2004 and the common Chinese language interface, go to the website of "Digital 21 Strategy": www.info.gov.hk/digital21/eng/structure/cli_main.html.

Ends/Sunday, May 22, 2005

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