Foolestroupe -

I believe last I heard you're still using Win98SE. Pure and simple, Win98 does not support Unicode. (WinME, surprisingly, is even worse.) There are some workarounds that will let you use lots more characters, but they're not really "using Unicode."

The oldest Windows version with full Unicode support built into the OS is Win2K, and it's nearing obsolete/unsupported status. WinXP has all the bells and whistles, but some of them are difficult to get.

Unicode (basic) uses 16 bits to represent a character, and Win98 only accomodates 8 bit characters in the OS. Win98 can use a "translation" table to move/map character numbers into an 8-bit "page" so that the glyphs for higher numbered characters get printed/displayed, but that's only approximating "real Unicode." The "music fonts" mentioned by several people generally are of this kind. The glyph that the "page" presents in response to an 8-bit character number that would otherwise be a normal text character is a "music symbol" but the font IS NOT A UNICODE FONT, even though it's possible to translate a Unicode character number to a position on the page.

Rev 2 of the Unicode standard added "surrogate pages" since the 65,536 characters that can be separately identified by 16-bit character numbers aren't enough for some languages. TWO 16-bit numbers are used for characters from the "surrogate pages" to represent each character. Win2K or WinXP either can mostly handle the DWORD characters, although WinXP has a "fuller set" in default setups. The "music glyphs" in Unicode generally are in the "surrogate page" range.

A more recent "Unicodish" development is the new Chinese character encoding schema GB 18030. In this system, many characters require FOUR 16-bit numbers (allowing 1.6 million characters) to specify an individual character. Both Win2K and WinXP can be "fixed" to handle these, but "it ain't easy and it ain't free." This is not (yet) part of the Unicode standard, but is required for all new machines sold in China. (Win98 is grandfathered and still permitted, WinME IS NOT.)

Try Dr International at Microsoft for more information. I'd suggest starting with some of the early "columns." These are aimed at people writing software, so you may be interested although most here may consider them "too techie." (These columns date back to when Win2K was new, so some of them may be "oldish" for WinXP. They appear to have been written mostly after Win98 was declared dead.)

John