Important Notice

The pages on this site contain documentation for very old MS-DOS software, purely for historical purposes. If you're looking for up-to-date documentation, particularly for programming, you should not rely on the information found here, as it will be woefully out of date.

                                                     ◄Up► ◄Next► ◄Previous►
────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
 
The Microsoft Windows character sets define the correspondence between
graphic symbols and 8-bit character values. The order of symbols in a
character set specifies the required order of bitmap and vector glyph data
in Windows font files. Windows currently supports three characters sets:
ANSI, OEM, and Symbol. This appendix defines these character sets and
illustrates the symbols associated with each set.
 
ANSI Characters
 
The ANSI characters includes the standard ASCII characters as well as
several international and desktop publishing characters. ANSI is the default
character set for Windows.
 
Printer drivers should support ANSI whenever possible. If necessary, the
printer should convert ANSI codes to the native character set for the
printer or the printer font. For example, the PCL/HP LaserJet driver
supplied with Windows converts ANSI into US ASCII, HP Roman 8, or ECMA 94,
depending on the character set of the selected printer font. This requires
that the printer font contain symbols similar to those used in ANSI.
 
TrueType Extensions to ANSI Character Set
 
The Windows ANSI character set now includes 19 new characters for TrueType
fonts only.
 
ANSI Position  Character
────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
131 (0x83)     Florin (latin small letter script f)
 
132 (0x84)     Based Line Double Quotes (low double comma quotation mark)
 
133 (0x85)     Ellipsis (horizontal ellipsis)
 
134 (0x86)     Dagger (Olelisk)
 
135 (0x87)     Double Dagger
 
137 (0x89)     Permil (per mille sign)
 
138 (0x8A)     S Hacek (upper case; latin capital letter s hacek)
 
139 (0x8B)     Diminuitive Less Than Sign (left pointing single guillemet)
 
140 (0x8C)     Ligature (upper case; latin capital letter o e)
 
147 (0x93)     Open Double Quotes (double turned comma quotation mark)
 
148 (0x94)     Close Double Quotes (double comma quotation mark)
 
149 (0x95)     Bullet
 
150 (0x96)     Short En Dash (en dash)
 
151 (0x97)     Long Em Dash (em dash)
 
153 (0x99)     Trademark
 
154 (0x9A)     s Hacek (lower case; latin small letter s hacek)
 
155 (0x9B)     Diminuitive Greater Than sign (right pointing single
               guillemet)
 
156 (0x9C)     Ligature (lower case; latin small letter o e)
 
159 (0x9F)     Y Dieresis (upper case; latin capital letter y diaresis)
 
OEM Characters
 
The OEM characters correspond to a computer's native character set. For
example, on IBM PC computers used in the United States, the OEM character
set is the IBM PC character set.
 
Symbol Characters
 
The Symbol characters are a rich set of characters used for mathematics and
desktop publishing.
 
Other Characters
 
Other character sets are occasionally used for special purposes in specific
applications or specialized drivers. If an application encounters a
character set that it does not recognize when enumerating fonts, it should
remember the font and character set index to allow the user to select the
font and print it, unless it relies on the assignment of characters to byte
values. The application should make no assumptions about character
assignments.
 
Font Mapping
 
GDI considers a font's character set as the most important attribute when
selecting a font from those available. The character set has a high weight
to ensure that the output is at least meaningful if not beautiful. To
prevent unexpected results, drivers that implement their own font mappers in
the RealizeObject function should use criteria similar to GDI's when
selecting fonts.
 
 
                                      ♦