Home > Electronic Services > Electronic Submission > III. General Format, Manner and Procedure for the Submission of Electronic Information

Electronic Services

III. General Format, Manner and Procedure for the Submission of Electronic Information

  1. Electronic records which contain English characters only shall be coded in American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII) or ISO 10646-1:2000.


  2. Electronic records which contain Chinese characters shall be coded as follows:


    1. Chinese characters shall be coded in Big-5 and English characters shall be coded in ASCII, and the set of Chinese characters is restricted to the characters defined in Big-5 or the characters included in the Hong Kong Supplementary Character Set (HKSCS) published by the Government in 2001; or

    2. Chinese and English characters shall be coded in ISO 10646-1:2000, the set of Chinese characters is restricted to the Chinese characters within the Chinese-Japanese-Korean (CJK) Unified Ideographs characters defined in the ISO 10646-1:2000 or the characters in the HKSCS published by the Government in 2001.

  3. Where electronic records are compressed, the following compression standards shall be followed: -


    1. Zip file (.zip); or

    2. GNU zip file (.gz)

  4. Electronic records shall be sent through electronic mail conforming to the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP), and either Multipurpose Internet Mail Extension (MIME) or the Secure Multipurpose Internet Mail Extension (S/MIME) standard and with size not exceeding 5 MB.


  5. Electronic records shall follow the following file format standards: -


    1. Plain text (TXT);

    2. Microsoft Rich Text Format (RTF);

    3. Hypertext Mark Up Language (HTML) Format; or

    4. Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF) v1.2, 1.3, 1.4, 1.5, or 1.6 (compatible to Acrobat version 3, 4, 5, 6 or 7).

  6. Graphics in electronic records shall follow the following graphic file formats: -


    1. Encapsulated PostScript Files (EPSF);

    2. Tag Image File Format (TIFF);

    3. Portable Network Graphics (PNG);

    4. Graphics Interchange Format (GIF); or

    5. Joint Photographic Experts Group (JPEG).

  7. Computer Aided Design (CAD) drawings in electronic records shall follow the following CAD file format: -


    1. Autodesk Drawing Exchange Format (DXF).

  8. An electronic record given, presented or served under a statutory provision must be signed with a digital signature if: -


    1. the provision expressly requires the signature of a person; or

    2. the provision requires the submission to be made in a specified form and the specified form has a signature requirement.

  9. A digital signature shall be attached to an electronic record in accordance with the Secure Multipurpose Internet Mail Extension (S/MIME) standard, the Public-Key Cryptography Standards (PKCS#7) or PDF v1.5/1.6.


  10. For an electronic record which comprises multiple electronic files and which has to be signed, each individual file shall be separately signed digitally.


  11. Electronic records given, presented or served shall not contain any computer instructions, including but not limited to: -


    1. computer viruses; and

    2. macros, scripts and fields that depend on the execution environment and the execution of which will cause changes to the electronic record itself or the information system displaying the electronic record.

  12. For submission of Government forms to Government, the Electronic Government Forms (in the form of a software) should be used to generate electronic records and, if required, to make digital signatures. The format of individual supporting document, if any, attached in an electronic record should comply with all the relevant requirements specified in this part, except paragraph 12.
Back Top