Let's begin with some basic definitions. The principal coded standards for Traditional Chinese are Big Five and CNS 11643, both established in Taiwan. For Simplified Chinese, the standards are GB and GBK, both established in China. It unifies the national and industry standards of China, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Vietnam, and Singapore. Encodings define elements called code values.
Fonts define the rendering of glyphs .
Basically, fonts pick up where character sets and encodings leave off. The difference between identifying a code value and rendering it on screen or paper is that the character identified by a code value is an abstract entity, whereas the mark made on screen or paper, called a glyph, is a visual representation of the character. Encodings do not define glyph images. That is, they define how characters are interpreted, not how glyphs are rendered. Big Five contains 13,051 distinct Chinese characters, arranged in two levels by number of strokes and then by radical.