breastle screen for HLA Adventure Need help designing one 849

Jukka Aho

UNICODE is completely identical to ASCII for the first 127 character positions...which, yes, means that it's all "control codes" up to 20h (space)...

But, one of the intentions with UNICODE was to provide "round-trip compatibility" with all major standards currently in use (which simply means that if you convert from some standard to UNICODE then convert back to the original standard, you should suffer no "information loss"...another way to put it: Though they may be in different positions, UNICODE tries to include all the characters found in all the other major standards)...

Hence, the "happy face" is to be found in UNICODE at U+263A and U+263B (the first is the "white happy face" (outline) and the second is "black happy face" (filled)...apparently, the two happy faces is meant to be "racial equality", judging by these "official names"...though, wouldn't the colours selected actually determine if the faces are "black" or "white"? Indeed, I think "outline" and "filled" might actually be more appropriate names...but, there you are, I don't work for UNICODE, so my opinion is irrelevent and the names are "WHITE SMILING FACE" and "BLACK SMILING FACE" - pardon the SHOUTING but UNICODE names officially are always in ALL CAPS to avoid "case" issues - like it or not)...

Also, the range U+2500 to U+257F supplies the familiar "box drawing characters" from IBM's "extended ASCII"...plus, "extends" it a little with rounded corners, diagonal lines as well as "bold line" box characters, as well as the usual "single" and "double" line stuff that was in the IBM character set...

Because of the "round-trip compatibility", then all the characters in that "IBM extended ASCII" set can be found in UNICODE...somewhere...you just have to "hunt them down" amongst the thousands of characters, as, though they are there, they've "moved positions"...

By the same token, all the Postscript "dingbats" are included too...a whole range of "mathematical operators"...geometric shapes...and so forth...that, in fact, UNICODE is a very good character set just to get all these "funny characters" and "dingbats" by itself (it must have more of them than any other character set), even if you don't really care for the more famous "international languages" part of UNICODE...

Of course, the real problem with UNICODE is that it might "define" all these characters...but if you haven't "got the right fonts installed" for the characters to actually show up on the screen, then having the characters "defined" is not greatly useful when you can't actually see them on the screen! ;)

Beth :)