Sorting it all Out Michael Kaplan's random stuff of dubious value Be sure to read the disclaimer here first!
If you look at the Platform SDK topics for both WideCharToMultiByte and MultiByteToWideChar, you will notice one very interesting code page entry:
CP_SYMBOL Windows 2000/XP: Symbol code page (42)
Of course if you go up to the reference information on the various Windows code pages you will not see this code page defined, so how is one to know what it is converting to and from?
Well, I'll tell you....
Basically, everything from 0x00 - 0x1f maps to U+0000 - U+001f.
Then, everything from 0x20 - 0xff maps to U+f020 - U+f0ff (in the Unicode private use area).
And if you pass anything outside of those ranges to WideCharToMultiByte, the conversion fails and GetLastError will return ERROR_NO_UNICODE_TRANSLATION.
Now the original goal of this pseudo-codepage was to work with GDI's ExtTextOut and symbol fonts, but unfortunately GDI maps by a different scheme and will accept U+0020 - U+00ff. Which means in practice that the two technologies simply do not work well together. There was even a bug or two related to processes that innocently assumed that symbol fonts and symbol code pages worked together properly and would end up with bad records in EMF/WMF files.
It is too late to change the code page, and might be too late to change the core GDI behavior, so this CP_SYMBOL code page remains as a monument to features that no one can use, but it is not worth taking out just in case someone is using it....
This post brought to you by "" (U+f0ff, a.k.a. one of the many <Private Use> characters in Unicode)
Chad's question was simple enough: Hello. I am trying to output character 0x80 from font Wingdings 3.
Rasqual asks: Hello Michael, I'll keep the question short: What makes a 'good' encoding, and what makes
From the list of bugs from that cool presentation from the folks over in Intel localization.... The bug?
Thank you very much for posting this!!!
I search everywhere and couldn't find a table anywhere else to convert symbol characters to Unicode.
"Or maybe not. MS and Apple were once very involved on even more fronts than today in regard to fonts and TrueType.... "
Yep, they for example developed TrueType together.