I thought that font had a lot of supplementary characters? (aka The highest number of tangents I could fit into a single blog)

by Michael S. Kaplan, published on 2008/02/27 10:01 -05:00, original URI: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2008/02/27/7897776.aspx

Yun asked:

Hello,

We are investigating issues regarding to surrogated pair character on Japanese OS, we couldn’t see these chars in CharMap.

Are there any other tools or do we need to do anything special to make these chars visible to CharMap?

Thanks,
Yun

Well, unfortunately Character Map does not handle supplementary characters.

This is something I have mentioned previously, in blogs like Is Vista Leaving on a Jet Plane [1]? and I'm simply saying that life^H^H^H^Hcharacters, uh...find a way, as regular readers may recall.

In fact, if you have a font that only supports supplementary characters (as some beta versions of one or two of the CJK fonts did in Vista!), then Character Map will simply show a blank grid -- a genuinely bizarre sight outside of RFS scenarios that one expects might even ASSERT on debug builds, let me tell you. :-)

Fun tangent, and a bit of trivia --

I actually remember an ASSERT and AV from an MSLU-enabled debug version of Character Map that I ran on windows 98 back in the day (I found the MSLU bug that caused the problem, thankfully - so no one else had to!).

Another fun tangent --

Once upon a time back when Vista was called Longhorn, Sergey came and asked me if we could add Unicode subranges to the list of ones included in Character Map.

I told him that we definitely could if he could find out how the .UCE files that contained the information were built.

And then he never mentioned it again (and the subranges weren't updated in Vista, either!)....

Anyway, you can use the Word 97 version of the Insert Symbol... dialog, something that many people feel should be a part of the operating system.

Yet another fun tangent --

Murray Sargent once asked me a few years back why we didn't just add the Office Insert Symbol... dialog to Windows.

I asked him how many calls to the Office shared DLL the Insert Symbol... dialog made.

"The exact number?" he asked, puzzled.

"Of course not," I reassured him, "just a ballpark figure."

"I'm really not sure. A lot, probably."

"So what does that dialog look like if the DLL isn't there? I mean, since the Office DLL doesn't ship with Windows, and all. I'm just curious..." I trailed off.

Murray never asked me about including the dialog in Windows again.

And it didn't end up in Vista, either. :-)

I think about those conversations and realize that I am probably overstating their importance. I mean Murray talked to a whole bunch of people after that one long-ago conversation, and Sergey talked to a whole bunch of people after that other one long-ago conversation.

I can't get program managers to give up on things even when they really ought to after years of conversation, so what are the odds that I inspired a couple of developers to do so just by pointing out an obstacle or two in single serving conversation? :-)

In any case, I think I've run out of tangents and trivia. Plus the question has been answered (and if it is not sufficient, then the comments of those other two posts have some suggestions for other tools that help make it happen)....

This blog brought to you by 𐐲 (U+10432, aka DESERET SMALL LETTER SHORT O)

# Bradley Grainger on 28 Feb 2008 5:19 PM:

# Mihai on 28 Feb 2008 8:03 PM:

referenced by

go to newer or older post, or back to index or month or day