The Unicode Consortium web page has been cleaned up a lot since I last spent a little time there, and is a lot prettier than before.

At the Code Charts page you can find a list of charts, and a search box where you can insert the HEX number for a character and find which chart(s) contain that character . Down at the bottom of this page, there's a link to Character Names where you can look up a character (glyph) by its name and find the proper HEX code for it.

Each Code Chart generally is two or three pages and contains characters for a (fairly short) sequence of char numbers. Each chart is a pdf that you can download and save on your own machine if you like. The © disclaimer says you are free to download these for "personal and internal business use," and I have found it convenient to have charts for the range of HEX codes Windows can (more or less) handle. I keep copies of the charts for HEX 0001 thru HEX 7FFF (Decimal 1 thru 32767)handy on my machine, just in case I want to look for something (32 charts). Many of the charts do have "gaps" for character numbers that are "reserved," "undefined," and/or just "unprintable."

Recent Windows versions may contain two fonts that are "extended" to include lots of characters not in the majority of common fonts, but they may not be installed automatically since they are "very large" and may bog down your computer if used for general correspondence:

The Character Map will show one as "Arial Unicode MS" (it's 22,731 KB on your disk) and the other as "Lucida Sans Unicode" (a mere 318 KB). Note that NEITHER OF THESE is even remotely close to including "all the Unicode characters."

I do find two fonts on my Win7 computer with larger file sizes than the Arial Unicode, "Microsft YaHei" at 35,519 KB and "Microsoft JungHei" at 35,328 KB, but have no real idea what they're good for. (My current Win7/Office2007 shows 226 fonts available in the Character Map, but the only explanation I can offer for most of them is "they came with her when I married her.")

John