Statement of Purpose

This presentation discusses various proposals to extend the ideographic repertoire of Unicode.

Summary

A number of proposals originating with the IRG in East Asia are currently under active consideration by the Unicode Consortium and WG2 for addition to Unicode and ISO/IEC 10646-1. These proposals should be taken into account by implementors of Unicode.

First is the Vertical Extension A, a set of some 6500 ideographs which are targeted for encoding at U+3400. These characters are derived from older national standards from Taiwan and the PRC, from new national standards in Korea and Vietnam, and from major industrial standards in Japan. The addition of these characters to Unicode goes far towards covering the major needs of existing users.

Next are proposals to add the KangXi radicals and ideographic variation character. The significance and possible uses of these characters will be discussed.

Next is the Han composition scheme under development. Some of the rational behind composition schemes for Han will be discussed and illustrations of how this method works will be given.

Finally, there is the proposal to reserve one plane in surrogate space for ideograph encoding.

The fundamental purpose of this presentation is to summarize all of these proposals and provide information on their current status and relationship to Unicode as a whole.