cmd.exe on WIndows - problem with displaying some Unicode characters

[Terry Reedy]

On 8/4/2014 11:00 AM, Wiktor wrote:

>    Yes, I'd like to make text game, that looks like window-based, with popup
> boxes, inactive windows grayed out and all this stuff. And all this running
> on standard console window (cmd.exe).

Your problem doing this is that cmd.exe is not a standard since 30 years 
ago full-screen console window, , but is intentionally crippled to stop 
people from doing what you are trying to do. Some as MS would like to 
delete it altogether.

>    I'm not starting from scratch. I'm using packages 'termcolor', 'colorama'
> and 'colorconsole' -

All on pypi.python.org, I see.

 > they provide functions to print text at desired
> position on screen, and change color of foreground/background of this text.
> With those packages I already developed some classes that allow me to
> construct some simple menus for my console programs. Short demo of silly
> program calculating degree of n-th root:
>    http://youtu.be/V8ilLhHAT_k

I am impressed with what the authors of those packages managed to do.

>    I'm taking next step, so I tried to draw nice frame around menu (that's
> why I posted yesterday).

Is there no working codepage with ascii text and the line chars? I 
suppose I am not surprised if not.

>    Next step would be to manage those widgets to draw one over another, to
> keep track which one window opens which, and when the other window must be
> closed and when only grayed out. At this point I still don't know how to do
> this right, but I'm thinking about this very hard. :-) Probably one day
> I'll ask it here, if I don't figure it out. :-)

You may have to settle for using different background colors to 
delineate different boxes.

-- 
Terry Jan Reedy