Linear codes of 2-designs as subcodes of the generalized Reed-Muller codes

This paper is devoted to the affine-invariant ternary codes defined by Hermitian functions. We first compute the incidence matrices of the 2-designs supported by the minimum weight codewords of these ternary codes. Then we show that the linear codes spanned by the rows of these incidence matrices are subcodes of the 4-th order generalized Reed-Muller codes and also hold 2-designs. Finally, we determine the dimension and develop a lower bound on the minimum distance of the ternary linear codes.