Character Set Plus!
Unicode Update for 2007.7.4 (Happy Independence Day for US readers!)
More specific info about CJKV fonts was entered; mistakes in some descriptions corrected; ambiguous text clarified; and some mystery regarding Majalla UI font. Also for UTF-8 & UTF-16 test pages, Mongolian & Phags-pa characters are now displayed in vertical form, to be consistent with Unicode code-chart practices.
At last, I can now update my page on keyboard layouts to reflect the changes introduced by Windows Vista.
This site is dedicated to Character Encodings (Charsets), Windows Keyboard Layouts (KBDs), and many other related extras.
You can test here various charsets in use today by many computers around the world. Most of them will require you to have certain Unicode-compatible fonts like Arial Unicode MS, Code2000, Segoe UI, & Tahoma. I also recommend to view most of them under a recent browser like Microsoft Internet Explorer 7.0 or Netscape Browser 8.0 or higher or equivalents, which have a wider charset support, and that you run a recent operating system like Microsoft Windows Vista or Apple Macintosh OS X or higher.
You can view here the key mappings of all pre-Vista keyboard layouts available from Windows. All of them are included with Windows 2000, XP, Server 2003, & Vista. Vista keyboard layouts will be described later after finishing my test pages for Unicode 5.0 Plane 1.
Useful Links:
- Code2000.net: a multilingual Unicode 5.0-compliant serif font. Don’t be cheated by its almost-minimalistic file size: this font covers more than 60,000 characters from Unicode 5.0 Plane 0 (much more than the 23-MB Arial Unicode MS font supplied with Microsoft Office).
- Czyborra Republic: homepage of Roman Czyborra, whose work is related to codepages, character sets, and Unicode.
- Evertype: Everson Mono: a multilingual Unicode 5.0-compliant fixed-width font.
- Simtel.net: a freeware/shareware/public domain software repository from which you can download lots of useful software.
- Tavultesoft: an Australian site from which you can download Keyman, a keyboard layout manager that lets you use custom-made keyboard layouts not made by Windows but by independent developers around the world. Here you can also download many of these custom keyboard layouts.
- Unicode Consortium: the site that hosts the international character set standard from which all charsets are based on.
- Unicode Fonts for Windows: lists many Unicode-compatible fonts and programs or locations from which they can be obtained or downloaded. Some of them are freeware, while others are shareware or commercial.
- WAZU JAPAN’s Gallery of Unicode Fonts: also lists many Unicode-compatible fonts, categorized by the scripts they support, and some GIF samples of these fonts when used for their corresponding scripts.
Updated 2007.6.9. Run by: Leroy Vargas. For feedback related to charsets or this website, Leroy can be contacted through his Lycos address.