ISO includes 27,564 Chinese characters (U+4E00~U+9FFF and U+3400~U+4DFF) in the ISO10646-2000 basic plane (also known as the Basic Multilingual Plane or BMP in Unicode 3.0, hereinafter called Unicode). Those Chinese characters were suggested for people to support when issuing GB18030 in March 2000. A total of 6582 Chinese characters from U+3400~U+4DFF were added, also known as Extension A. At the same time, ISO also extended 42,711 Chinese characters (also called Extension B) within the supplementary planes of ISO10646-2000. The encoding table of 42,711 Chinese characters has been determined, although the possibility of future minor changes occurring is still possible at the time that this help file was being written. Because these 42,711 Chinese characters are supplementary characters in ISO10646-2000, the encoding of them requires four bytes per character. In anticipation of the need to access and use these characters, the Surrogate mechanism (named UTF-16 in ISO10646-2000) was introduced into Unicode when version 2.0 was released. Using the surrogate pair mechanism, two 16-bit codes can be used to access the Chinese characters in Extension B.
Starting with Windows 2000 (definitely not in Windows 98, Windows ME or Windows NT4), Microsoft offered support to the surrogate pair mechanism. So long as the corresponding input method and font are available and the corresponding support in the application is offered, the above-mentioned Chinese characters should be able to be input and displayed. However, to get the overall support of surrogate pairs (including the exact display in this help file), the user needs to download and install the Surrogate Package first.
In Office XP (also known as Office 2002), the Simplified Chinese version and corresponding multilingual packages, Microsoft developed the ultra large character set Chinese font(a.k.a. "Song typeface - Founder ultra large character set") and the enhancement-type zone bit code.To install "SimSun (Founder Extended)", please select:
Office Shared functions in the Office setup interface ->Chinese font-> Chinese ultra large character set font
If you install it from the MultiLanguage pack, please select:
Office Shared Features- >Chinese fonts->Chinese Extended font
in the setup interface. The SimSun (Founder Extended) font includes all of 27,564 Chinese characters mentioned above as well as 36,862 Chinese characters selected from the second plane (42,711) used by the Chinese Mainland, and HKSAR (as well as part of Taiwan region). Therefore, SimSun (Founder Extended) has a total of 65,531 characters, including many of the common characters of western languages.