Editing Chinese characters (section)

==== Encoding and interchange ====
{{Main|Chinese character encoding}}
{{See also|Han unification|CJK Unified Ideographs}}
While special text encodings for Chinese characters were introduced prior to its popularization, ''[[The Unicode Standard]]'' is the predominant text encoding worldwide.{{sfn|Lunde|2008|p=193}} According to the philosophy of the [[Unicode Consortium]], each distinct graph is assigned a number in the standard, but specifying its appearance or the particular [[allograph]] used is a choice made by the engine rendering the text.{{efn-ua |{{Citation |title=Technical Introduction |date=22 August 2019 |url=https://www.unicode.org/standard/principles.html |access-date=11 May 2024 |publisher=The Unicode Consortium}} }} Unicode's [[Basic Multilingual Plane]] (BMP) represents the standard's 2<sup>16</sup> smallest code points. Of these, {{val|20992}} (or {{sigfig|32.03125|2}}%) are assigned to [[CJK Unified Ideographs]], a designation comprising characters used in each of the [[Chinese family of scripts]]. As of version {{Unicode version|version=16.0}}, published in 2024, Unicode defines a total of {{val|98682}} Chinese characters.{{efn-ua |{{Cite Unicode |date=31 July 2024 |editor-last=Lunde |editor-first=Ken |editor-last2=Cook |editor-first2=Richard |chapter=Standard Annex #38: Unicode Han Database (Unihan) |chapter-url=https://www.unicode.org/reports/tr38/tr38-37.html#BlockListing |editor-link=Ken Lunde |location=}} }}