Artful C -

A possible correction to a correction you made a little above is that the Euro is not an ANSI character, or at least wasn't the last time I looked a year or so ago.

That decimal character number was, and apparently still is, defined in ANSI as a "reserved number" with no assigned meaning. That allows any individual font designers and/or programmers to assign any character they need to that number. (And Unicode includes a fairly large number of such "unassigned" or "reserved" character numbers.)

Microsoft simply elected to use the Alt-Numpad-128 method to allow users without a € key on their keyboard an easier way to enter the new symbol.

When you use the Alt-Numpad-128 method in recent Word versions, the character actually printed has the correct Unicode numerical value of Hex 208C. The transformation in Windows is actually done in the "character code pages" that flip in and out of RAM during use of programs.

Essentially, the use of Alt-Numpad-128 for the ₌ is just a keyboard shortcut, added as a default in recent Windows versions, that enters something other than what you type.

John