Traditional Chinese Solaris User's Guide

Character Sets

The Traditional Chinese Solaris operating environment conforms to the CNS 11643 standard, updated in late 1992, and the Big5 character sets. CNS 11643-1992 is a Chinese national standard in Taiwan. It defines 16 planes, 7 planes of which are assigned:

Table 4-1

Plane 

Contents 

Plane 1 

Miscellaneous symbols, Hanzi radicals, and Roman and Greek alphabets, total 684 symbol characters in the range of 0x2121 to 0x427E, and 5,401 most commonly used Hanzi characters in the range of 0x4421 to 0x7D4B. 

Plane 2 

A total of 7,650 secondary commonly-used Hanzi characters in the range of 0x2121 to 0x7244. 

Plane 3 

A total of 6,148 other Hanzi characters, including some user-defined characters from the original plane 14 characters and different shaped characters in the range 0x2121-0x6246 from the Republic of China's (ROC) Department of Education. 

Plane 4 

This plane contains a total of 7,298 characters, including some of ISO/IEC 10646 defined CJK Unified Han characters (range: 0x2121-0x6E5C). 

Plane 5 

This plane contains a total of 8,603 characters that the ROC Department of Education defined as currently-used characters but not included in planes 1 through 4 (range: 0x2121-0x7C51). 

Plane 6 

This plane contains a total of 6,388 characters that the ROC Department of Education defined as different shaped characters but not included in planes 1 through 5 (range: 0x2121-0x647A). 

Plane 7 

This plane contains a total of 6,539 characters that the ROC Department of Education defined as different shaped characters but not included in planes 1 through 6 (range: 0x2121-0x6655). 

Planes 8 to 11 

These planes are not yet assigned. 

Planes 12 to 16 

These planes are for user-defined characters. 

Big5 was defined by five major Taiwanese computer vendors (including the Institute of Information Industry) in May, 1984. Although Big5 is not the national standard, it is more widely used than the CNS 11634-1992

The total number of characters defined in Big5 is 13,523. It is a subset of CNS 11643-1992.

Traditional Chinese Solaris software provides code conversion between Chinese code conventions at three levels of support: