The principles for the inclusion of characters in the Hong Kong Supplementary Character Set have been revised so only ISO 10646 code points will be assigned to newly included characters, the Office of the Government Chief Information Officer says.

Both ISO 10646 code points and Big 5 code points were assigned to newly included characters before. To foster the adoption of international standards, Big 5 code points will no longer be assigned from March 31. The characters already assigned with code points before the date will not be affected.

People can consider migrating their computer systems to ISO 10646 standard in accordance with their needs. The international coding standard ISO 10646 embraces characters used in all major languages in the world, including ideographic characters in traditional and simplified Chinese. The adoption of the standard provides a unified coding standard ensuring compatibility.