ANSI: For single byte word, early operation system mostly applies ANSI code. ANSI (American National Standards Institute) code is code set for single byte (8-bit), can show 256 characters at most. It is applied to all Asian languages with single byte, such as Tagalog, Indonesian, but it cannot be used to show characters for Chinese, Japanese and Korean.

So other different double byte code set such as Big 5, GBK is designed based on ANSI code to process the vast amount of characters for Chinese, Japanese and Korean. These code uses single byte to show the English letters of ANSI (that is compatible ANSI code), double bytes for Chinese characters.

Unicode: Unicode is a relatively new International Standards code, which adopt the way of 16-bit to make uniform Coding for all kinds of languages characters in order to apply to different operation platform for all kinds of languages.

Unicode Little Endian is mainly applied to X86 systems (such as Intel), but Unicode Big Endian is widely used in RISC systems (such as Alpha, Mac). To apply Unicode font in the software which supported Unicode, it is possible to finish the DTP for multi-languages.

UTF-8: Variant of Unicode, use 8-bit code, each character comprised 1-4 bytes. In the software which supported Unicode, it is usually used as common encoding standard for exchange of a variety of encoding texts.

GB 2312: GB code is the encoding for Simplified Chinese Characters published by People’s Republic of China in 1980, which is wildly used in Chinese, Singapore. It encodes 6763 character sets which cover most of the characters being used.

GBK: GBK code is the extended character encoding of GB 2313, which encodes more than 20,000 simplified and traditional Chinese characters, downward compatible with GB 2313. Simplified version of Windows uses GBK as system code.

GB18030-2000: GB18030 is a new Chinese character coding standard, which uses the way of double byte, single byte and 4-byte to make encoding, supports CJK characters. It is downward compatible with GB 2313 and GBK code.

BIG-5: BIG-5 is a Chinese character encoding for Traditional Chinese, which is widely used in the computer system of Taiwan and Hong Kong. Traditional version of Windows uses GBK as system code.

Shift-JIS/EUC-JP: commonly used Japanese encoding standard

Unified Hangul Code/EUR-KR: commonly used Korean encoding standard

VNI/CPI1258/VISCII/Unicode: commonly used Vietnamese encoding standard

TIS620/Unicode: commonly used Thai encoding standard