Overview
TRON Code is a multi-byte character encoding used in the TRON project. It is similar to Unicode but does not use Unicode's Han unification process: each character from each CJK character set is encoded separately, including archaic and historical equivalents of modern characters. This means that Chinese, Japanese, and Korean text can be mixed without any ambiguity as to the exact form of the characters; however, it also means that many characters with equivalent semantics will be encoded more than once, complicating some operations.
TRON has room for 150 million code points. Separate code points for Chinese, Korean, and Japanese variants of the 70,000+ Han characters in Unicode 4.1 (if that were deemed necessary) would require more than 200,000 code points in TRON. TRON includes the non-Han characters from Unicode 2.0, but it has not been keeping up to date with recent editions to Unicode as Unicode expands beyond the Basic Multilingual Plane and adds characters to existing scripts. The TRON encoding has been updated to include other recent code page updates like JIS X 0213.
Fonts for the TRON encoding are available, but they have restrictions for commercial use.
Structure
Each character in TRON Code is two bytes. Similarly to ISO/IEC 2022, the TRON character encoding handles characters in multiple character sets within a single character encoding by using escape sequences, referred to as language specifier codes, to switch between planes of 48,400 code points. Character sets incorporated into TRON Code include existing character sets such as JIS X 0208 and GB 2312, as well as other character sources such as the Dai Kan-Wa Jiten, and some scripts not included in other encodings such as Dongba symbols.
From Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0).