Investigation Into Using the Unicode Standard for Primitives of Unified Han Characters

The Unicode standard identifies and provides representation of the vast majority of known characters used in today’s writing systems. Many of these characters belong to the unified Han series, which encapsulates characters from writing systems used in languages such as Chinese, Japanese and Korean languages. These pictographic characters are often made up of smaller primitives, either other characters or more simplified pictography. This paper presents research findings of how the Unicode standard currently represents the primitives used in 4134 of the most common Han characters.