CNS (Traditional Chinese)

The Taiwan standard CNS 11643-1986 is a pair of 94x94 planes (or levels) derived from Big-5 and another 94x94 plane of user characters (rows 1-71), called plane 14. It may also be treated as a 3-byte 94-character code.

Plane 1 comprises

1-3

punctuation and other symbols (Big-5 characters A140-A2AE one minor change)

4-5

various numerals and assorted alphabets (Big-5 characters A2AF-A3BF)

6

enclosed numerals (Big-5 characters C7E9-C7FC) plus small Roman numerals

7-9

Kangxi radicals

34

symbols for control characters

36-93

frequently used hanzi (Big-5 characters A440-C67E)

Plane 2 is

1-82

less frequently used hanzi (BIG-5 characters C940-F9D5 except C94A and DDFC, eliminated as duplicates of A461 and DCD1 respectively)

The hanzi planes are ordered by stroke count and then Kangxi radical as in Big-5, but a few of the counts or radicals have been corrected (and the characters relocated) so the mapping is not continuous.

The revised code CNS 11643-1992 carries over planes 1 and 2 unchanged. Other planes are:

3

6148 hanzi from plane 14 of CNS 11643-1986 (rows 1-66)

4

7298 rarely used hanzi, including some used in names, 171 more hanzi from plane 14 of CNS 11643-1986 and hanzi in ISO/IEC 10646-1:1993 not in previous planes (rows 1-78)

5

8603 even rarer hanzi (rows 1-92)

6

6388 variant forms (yi4ti3zi4) with up to 14 strokes (rows 1-68)

7

6539 variant forms (yi4ti3zi4) with 15 or more strokes (rows 1-70)

Hanzi in the last 3 planes were supplied by the Ministry of Education. An eighth plane of about 7000 characters is in preparation.

Part of Notes on CJK Character Codes and Encodings.