character display problems with NT?

[Trisha]

I've been reading a lot about Unicode while trying to make sure that I use the proper Numeric Character References for non standard characters. One page I looked at had a test to see if everything displayed properly:
[alanwood.net...]

A large percent of the characters do not display properly for me, I get a box instead. I don't think it is a browser (IE 5.5) problem, because the page looked the same in Opera too. My guess is that it is because I use NT 4 as an OS. Does anyone know for sure that this is a problem with NT? And is there anything I can do about it?

Thanks!

[andreasfriedrich]

Usually I make it a point not to answer real questions in the foo forum, they donīt count for your posts count but here goes:

The box is displayed when there is no glyph in your font to display this character.

Perhaps some nice admin will move this to the proper real forum and Brettīs software is hopefully smart enough to realize that and increase my post count by one. ;) Do you realize that Iīm obsessed with post count?

Andreas

[Trisha]

The box is displayed when there is no glyph in your font to display this character.

yes, I realize this, but, and correct me if I'm wrong, it is not so much related to the font specified in the test document above, but that my OS doesn't carry the best/newest version of that font, or doesn't recognize all characters in the newest Unicode version, or something along those lines. Does anyone know if there is a patch or anything that can be downloaded for NT so that they would display properly?

Perhaps some nice admin will move this to the proper real forum ...

I figured this would be the correct forum as the charter says:

Miscellaneous topics (Especially computer and Internet-related!) not covered in other WebmasterWorld forums...

and this is not an HTML or browser problem but a OS issue, as far as I can tell.

[Trisha]

I did some more searches and found the following:

There are different standard encodings of Unicode, including UCS-2, which is NT's Unicode version, and UTF-8, the version of Unicode specified by version 3 of the LDAP protocol.

and

In order to use UTF-7 or UTF-8, you must first install Multilanguage Support in Windows 95 or NT.
The Multilanguage Support only covers a few languages, far fewer than the Unicode standard does.

So, it sounds like even if I do install the Multilanguage Support I still wouldn't be able to have all Unicode characters display on my computer. Oh well.