Big-5 (Traditional Chinese)
This is a 2-byte code, designed to represent traditional Chinese
characters. The first byte is A1-F9; the second byte 40-7E,A1-FE.
The code ranges are:
- A140-A24E
- punctuation and other symbols
- A24F-A258
- various units
- A259-A261
- Chinese units
- A262-A2AE
- box-drawing pieces and shapes
- A2AF-A2B8
- Arabic numerals
- A2B9-A2C2
- Roman numerals
- A2C3-A2CE
- Hangzhou numerals
- A2CF-A2E8
- Latin capital letters
- A2E9-A343
- Latin small letters
- A344-A35B
- Greek capital letters
- A35C-A373
- Greek small letters
- A374-A3BA
- zhuyin symbols
- A3BB-A3BF
- zhuyin diacritics
- A440-C67E
- frequently used hanzi (5401)
- C6A1-C6F7
- hiragana
- C6F8-C7B0
- katakana
- C7B1-C7E8
- Cyrillic letters
- C7E9-C7F2
- circled numbers
- C7F3-C7FC
- parenthesized numbers
- C940-F9D5
- less frequently used hanzi (7652)
Each of the hanzi blocks is ordered by total number of strokes,
then Kangxi radical no.
A variant is the Taiwan standard CNS-11643.
The font HKU-Ch16 (a.k.a. chinese.16)
uses a slight variant:
the less frequent hanzi are moved down to occupy C6A1-F755.
The usual encoding is a simple interleaving with plain US-ASCII text.
Part of Notes on CJK Character Codes and Encodings.