Traditional Chinese character

Traditional Chinese characters are one of two standard character sets of printed contemporary Chinese written language. It is the set of characters that has been used since the 5th century during the Southern and Northern Dynasties. It is called traditional in opposed to the other form - the simplified Chinese characters, created or standardised by the government of the People's Republic of China (mainland China) starting from the 1950s. Traditional Chinese is text written with Traditional Chinese characters. Traditional Chinese characters are used in Hong Kong, Macau, Taiwan, and some overseas Chinese communities; especially those originating from the aforementioned countries or who emigrated before the widepspread adoption of simplified characters in the People's Republic of China. In contrast, simplified characters are used in Mainland China, Malaysia, Singapore and in some overseas Chinese communities; especially those from aforementioned countries who emigrated after the widespread adoption of simplified Chinese characters.

Computer character encoding

In the past, Traditional Chinese was most often rendered using the Big5 character encoding scheme, a character encoding scheme that favors Traditional Chinese. Unicode, however, has become increasingly popular as a way to render Traditional Chinese. Unicode gives equal weight to both simplified and traditional Chinese characters and does not favor either over the other. There are various IMEs (Input Method Editors) available to input Chinese characters.

Related Topics:
Big5 - Unicode - IME - Input Chinese characters

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~