What Is Big5 Character Set

Big5 Tutorials - Herong's Tutorial Examples

∟What Is Big5 Character Set

Big5 Character Set is a set of 13,461 commonly used Chinese characters defined by Institute for Information Industry of Taiwan in 1984.

What Is Big5 Character Set? - Big5 (大五碼) Character Set is a set of 13,461 Chinese characters organized 3 blocks:

Special Symbols with 408 Characters - These includes symbols, numeric digits and alphabets of main Western languages, like 【】１２ＡＢ.
Level 1 with 5,401 Characters - These are frequently used characters (常用字), like 一乙丁七乃九.
Level 2 with 7,652 Characters - These are less frequently used characters (次常用字), like 乂乜凵纘纛纙.

Big5 standard (the character set and its encoding) was defined by the Institute for Information Industry of Taiwan in 1984. The name "Big5" is in recognition that the standard emerged from collaboration of five of Taiwan's IT firms: Acer (宏碁), MiTAC (神通), JiaJia (佳佳), ZERO ONE Technology (零壹), and First International Computer (大眾).

Main features of Big5 Standard:

It is designed for traditional Chinese characters. The simplified Chinese characters are included in the GB2312 character set.
It is used mainly in Taiwan, Hongkong and Macau.
There are a number of extensions were developed including Big5+ and Big5-2003 by The Chinese Foundation for Digitization Technology (中文數位化技術推廣委員會).

Table of Contents

About This Book

►Introduction to Big5

►What Is Big5 Character Set

What Is Big5 Encoding

Big5 vs. Unicode

Big5 Usage Trends

Big5Unicode.java - Big5 to Unicode Mapping

Big5 to Unicode Mapping - Special Symbols

Big5 to Unicode Mapping - Level 1 Characters

Big5 to Unicode Mapping - Level 2 Characters

UnicodeBig5.java - Unicode to Big5 Mapping

Unicode to Big5 Mapping - All 13,461 Characters

References of This Book - Big5 Tutorials

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