unicode mystery

[Alex Rice]

Paul Prescod wrote:

> I think the Symbol font is just not a Unicode font. Look in the Windows
> character map. Here's a hint. In the bottom left-corner, some fonts have
> their ordinals described like this: "U+0021" but Symbol has them just
> described as "0xCF". Also, the unicode fonts associate names with
> characters (again in the Character map). Symbol does not. Finally, I
> used some tools to look inside the Symbol file and it has "Product Name"
> of "Microsoft® Windows(TM) Operating System" and "Product Version" of
> "3.10". I think this means that the font hasn't been upgraded since
> Windows 3.1!!!
> 
> You need to switch to a Unicode font if you want to use Python's Unicode
> features.

Interesting... I think you are right. Happily, all the same characters
come through fine as Unicode if a font other than Symbol is used to
insert them into the document.

What app you using that you can see the ordinals of the fonts and the
char names? I don't see it NT4's character map viewer. Must be new in
Win2K.

However, these pesky Symbol characters seem to be difficult to get rid
of. (I'm not the author of these documents). I tried searching and
replacing in Word based on the Font but it seems to have no effect.
Stupid Symbol font.

Thanks for your comments,

Alex