Inclusion of New Characters in the HKSCS

The Government recognizes the need for the public and government departments to include new characters into the Hong Kong Supplementary Character Set (HKSCS) from time to time. In collaboration with the Chinese Language Interface Advisory Committee (CLIAC), the Government compiled and published the procedures for inclusion of new characters in the HKSCS and principles for inclusion of new characters in the HKSCS.

The CLIAC will meet regularly to consider applications for inclusion of characters in the HKSCS according to its procedures and principles. Once approved, the new HKSCS characters will be submitted to the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) for inclusion in the future releases of the ISO/IEC 10646 international coding standard.

Procedures for the Inclusion of Characters in the Hong Kong Supplementary Character Set (Revised Version)
  1. Members of the public and government departments may submit their applications for inclusion of characters in the Hong Kong Supplementary Character Set (HKSCS) to the Secretariat of the Chinese Language Interface Advisory Committee (CLIAC). An application should include the glyph, meaning and pronunciation of the character, and preferably with usage explanation, information on origin and sample sentences. If the application includes symbols, the applicant should submit the information of other related symbols.
  2. On receipt of applications submitted by members of the public, the Secretariat of the CLIAC will pass the applications to the Working Group of Chinese Language Interface Advisory Committee (Working Group) for examination. Applications submitted by government departments will initially be considered by an internal special duty group before being forwarded to the Working Group for examination.
  3. The Working Group will examine the applications according to the principles for the inclusion of characters as listed below. Members of the public and government departments should refer to these principles beforehand so as to avoid making unnecessary applications, prevent the waste of resources and help speed up the application process.
  4. Applications having passed the examination of the Working Group will be submitted to the CLIAC for approval. If the applications fulfill the criteria of “Urgently Needed Characters”, source references in the format of HC-0001 to HC-9999 will be assigned by the Secretariat of the CLIAC for applicants’ reference. The glyphs and related information of the approved characters will be published on the Internet. However, such information is for reference only. The approved characters will officially become part of the HKSCS at a later stage (see Paragraph 6 below).
  5. An unsuccessful application may be reconsidered by the Working Group upon request by the applicant and upon the applicant’s supplying further details of the character in the application. As many of these characters are assigned with ISO/IEC 10646 code points, users can handle these characters on platforms supporting ISO/IEC 10646 or Unicode.

    PDF File A list of characters not accepted for inclusion in the HKSCS (from 31.3.2008 onwards) is available for your reference or please visit List of Characters not Accepted for Inclusion in the HKSCS.

    The "List of Characters not Accepted for Inclusion in the HKSCS" is a web-based tool to facilitate the public and government departments to check whether the characters to be submitted have been reviewed before, thus saving the applicants' time and efforts in preparing their applications.

    Official Revision of the HKSCS
  6. The development of products by software developers to support new HKSCS characters takes time. Moreover, too frequent an update to the HKSCS will cause inconvenience and even chaos to users. Therefore, the Working Group will consider the practical timing of the official inclusion of the newly approved characters in the HKSCS, and make recommendations to the CLIAC for the official announcement of amendment to the HKSCS. After several amendments are published, the Working Group will consider the actual needs and then recommend the CLIAC to merge these amendments and publish a new version of the HKSCS.
  7. All newly approved HKSCS characters that are not yet included in the ISO/IEC 10646 will be submitted to the Ideographic Research Group (IRG) of the International Organization for Standardization (ISO).

    PDF File Principles for the Inclusion of Characters in the HKSCS

  8. By referring to the procedures for inclusion of Characters in the HKSCS, members of the public and government departments could submit their applications for inclusion of characters in the HKSCS to the Secretariat of the CLIAC. The assigned internal codes, glyphs and related information of the approved characters will be published on this website.
  9. Information of the approved characters including their assigned internal codes and glyphs is for reference only. In practical timing, the CLIAC would release the next revision of the HKSCS which includes the approved characters.

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Application for the Inclusion of Characters in the HKSCS
HKSCS web form
HKSCS PDF Form

Note:

  1. Applicants should make reference to the Procedures and Principles for the Inclusion of Characters in the HKSCS beforehand so as to avoid submitting unnecessary applications.
  2. Completed application forms can be submitted by fax, electronic mail or post to the Secretariat of the CLIAC:
    Fax : (852) 2519 7320
    E-Mail : cliac@ogcio.gov.hk
    Mail : 6/F, Cyberport 1, 100 Cyberport Road, Pokfulam, Hong Kong
  3. The Secretariat of the CLIAC will confirm with the applicants in respect of the receipt of the applications.
  4. When submitting applications for inclusion of characters in the HKSCS, please provide the necessary information as required. If the character information submitted is not complete, the Secretariat of the CLIAC will contact the applicants for follow up. If the applicants fail to submit the requested information within three months, the applications will be considered invalid.
  5. Approved characters will be published on the Internet. The applicants concerned will also be notified individually by the Secretariat of the CLIAC.

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