3,000 difficult Chinese characters digitized for global push

The coding of many Chinese characters that were previously unavailable in electronic format was completed in October as part of the country's largest State-funded digitization project.

Around 3,000 difficult characters have been digitized in accordance with a national standard and can be used in China as well as areas of East Asia with software support for written Chinese.

For global use, however, the letters will have to be released through Unicode - the world computing industry consortium - after being certified by the International Organization for Standardization. The Geneva-based body, of which China is a member, works with countries to build proprietary, industrial and commercial standards.