Bill D -

By "webmeister" of course I was referring to the master of your local network, said genius being the person in charge of providing "IT" resources, furnishing appropriate programs, and assuring they're properly installed on your individual machine.

The real point is that all the bells and whistles for full use of Unicode coding can be installed on WinXP or Win2K, but you can't get it unless you have access to a Server version of Windows. It doesn't come packaged separately - at least as far as I can tell.

An indication of how complex it is to actually use a Unicode equipped setup may be had from the little known(?) fact that when Microsoft Press made the newest edition of the "Bible" on International Character usage, [Developing International Software, 2d ed, ISBN 0-7356-1583-7, © 2003, USA $69.99/Canada $99.99] they did NOT set up any of the layout people or editors to actually use Unicode. ONE artist retrieved individual glyphs for each "foreign" character or bit of "non-Latin" text required in the book, and made .jpg graphics for insertion and printing of the book. (or so I'm told)

WinXP supposedly contains, in the default setup, at least two "extended fonts" that contain many more characters than in the usual Latin 1 setup. I don't remember for sure, but I believe that Tahoma TTF may be one of them (sans-serif) and Times New Roman TTF may be the serif version - but don't quote me, since I haven't looked it up recently. In addition, "Arial Unicode MS font is a full Unicode font." I don't know if this font comes with standard WinXP or Win2K installations, or whether it's one of those "get it from the Server version" things. I don't have it installed. It's HUGE, and additional utilities are required to use the right-to-left char order for some of the glyphs.

Typefaces with exactly the same name may or may not include extended characters. I have at least 7 or 8 "versions" of "Times New Roman," in TTF and Type 1/Type 2, (and possibly in one or more of those multi-use strange styles). Each has a slightly different selection of characters. For the technical purists, the "name" is the name of the typeface. The "font" is the selection of characters from that typeface that are in your box of character glyphs, waiting to be smeared onto a page.

Each typeface has a standard "default glyph" that it "prints" - to the screen or on paper - if you call for a character that is not contained in the font you have loaded. The correct character code should actually be present in your "document," so if someone who has a font - for the typeface they're using - that knows how to "draw" the glyph for that character, they should see it correctly even though you couldn't.

Conversely, if you use a character that works fine on your machine and/or your printer, another person who has a different font, even of the same typeface, that doesn't include that particular character, will see only the "default glyph" for "undefined character."

Nearly all US and Western Euro people will see the "Latin 1" typefaces, for characters from 031 to 255 (decimal codes, the ANSI set) correctly. These are really the only ones you can (usually) assume that anyone will be able to see.

Common fonts may contain many more characters, so there are fairly large selections of additional characters that can usually be used, that most but not necessarily all people will see rendered correctly. Figuring out which characters these are is a DIY process best carried out among a small user group consisting only of people who really need to be "fully legible" to each other.

John