section_path: Methods of writing/Use with computers/Encoding and interchange
section_name: Encoding and interchange
paragraph_text: Encoding and interchange
  
  While special text encodings for Chinese characters were introduced prior to its popularisation, The Unicode Standard is the predominant text encoding worldwide. 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. Unicode's Basic Multilingual Plane (BMP) represents the standard's 2 smallest code points. Of these, 20 992 (or 32 %) are assigned to CJK Unified Ideographs, a designation comprising characters used in each of the Chinese family of scripts. As of version 16.0, Unicode defines a total of 98 682 Chinese characters.