Authors: Lu Qin, Li Yin, Xing Hongbing, Li Ngai Ling and Chan Shiu Tong

The Hong Kong SAR government has recently completed two Hong Kong glyph Specifications for ISO 10646's ideographic characters, namely the Reference Guide of Kai Style Character Glyphs for Chinese Computer Systems in Hong Kong and the Reference Guide of Printed Character Glyphs(Song Style) for Chinese Computer Systems in Hong Kong. The objective of the project is to produce glyph specifications conforming to Hong Kong writing style. This can help font vendors to produce the appropriate fonts for Hong Kong.

Hong Kong uses traditional Chinese as its common writing style, but some character shapes used in Hong Kong are different from both used in Taiwan and mainland China. With the change of multi-column representation of ideograph characters in ISO/IEC 10646 Part 1 to Unicode adopted single column representation, it is even more confusing as to which character should be in what shape and also which character should be used when there are variant characters in the standard.

This paper will go through the motivation of this work first, and then explain the content of the specifications, the rationales for doing both the Kai Style and the Song/Ming style specifications, and the extensibility of this work. As the specifications use a new approach to define a character glyph using ideographic components, technical details as how characters are expressed through its components will be discussed and the rules and basis of decomposition of characters will also be presented. The last part of the paper will present the component database built for this project. The database provides a comprehensive set of searching functions, and can be extended easily to assist in the study of character composition and ideograph variants.

Keywords, Government Applications, Character Glyphs Standardization, character decomposition.