CNS 11643

The CNS 11643 character set (Chinese National Standard 11643), also officially known as the Chinese Standard Interchange Code or CSIC (), is officially the standard character set of Taiwan (Republic of China). Published and draft editions of CNS 11643 remain the source standards for Unicode reference glyphs for CJK Unified Ideographs submitted for use in Taiwan, and the character repertoire of CNS 11643 continues to be updated and used for administrative purposes in Taiwan. see also Kangxi Radicals (Unicode block)). Extensions to the standard were subsequently published in 1988 (6319 characters, occupying plane 14) and 1990 (7169 characters, occupying plane 15).

Unicode 1.0.0, although it did not yet include hanzi, included characters for compatibility with CNS 11643: the CJK Compatibility Forms block was titled "CNS 11643 Compatibility" in Unicode 1.0.0. When the Unicode CJK Unified Ideographs set was being compiled for Unicode 1.0.1, the national bodies submitted character sets to the CJK Joint Research Group for inclusion. The version of CNS 11643 submitted included the plane 14 extension, in addition to further desired characters appended to plane 14 (after 68–21, the last used code point in the standard version of the extension).

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!1988 extension

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!1990 extension

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!CJK-JRG version

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!1992 edition

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!ICU 2000

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!2007 edition

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!ICU 2014

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!Post-2007||15||4||5||6||7||8–14||16–19

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Current purpose and relationship to Unicode

The CNS 11643 repertoire includes characters used for administrative purposes in Taiwan, including household registration and ID cards, in addition to characters used in education. In particular, characters in planes 1 and 2 are used in education. Only the characters used in education are subjected to glyph-form normalisation in CNS 11643.

In some cases, two or more CNS 11643 characters correspond to a single Unicode CJK Unified Ideograph. These cases are (except where covered by the CJK Compatibility Ideographs Supplement block) currently mapped to Unicode Supplementary Private Use Area code points,

Relationship to Big5

Levels 1 and 2 of the Big5 encoding correspond mostly to CNS 11643 planes 1 and 2, respectively, with occasional differences in order, and with two duplicate hanzi existing in Big5 but not in CNS 11643. They can be mapped using a list of ranges. However, the 213 classical radicals in CNS 11643 plane 1 are additional to the characters available in Big5 (although they can be lossily mapped to the corresponding hanzi characters in Big5 or HKSCS), U+5F5D is separately included in CNS 11643 plane 3. Similarly, a single character from Big5 level 2 (including its IBM variant) is mapped to a different Unicode code point than its CNS 11643 plane 2 counterpart: to U+5284 (劄), while the Unihan database currently maps the CNS 11643 character to U+7B9A (箚); U+5284 appears in CNS 11643 plane 14.