Forums General Discussion UTF-8 support in mIRC

I was unsure whether to post this here or in the "Bugs" section, but Tjerk asked for feed-back and I couldn't pass out on the opportunity to compliment the author of Fixedsys Excelsior on his fine and laudable work, so here it is - thank you Darien.

Anyway, the issue I have is this:
I was thrilled when 6.17 came out because I deal a lot in strange languages and weird scripts, and indeed - I am grateful to Khaled for upgrading mIRC to support UTF-8, something I had been hoping for in years. But there is an issue that I don't think I've seen mentioned anywhere else. Namely this:

I have no problem inputting basic unicode text, like simple Greek letters (ελληνικη) or Japanese (にほんぎ), but whenever I try to input more complex unicode scripts mIRC just gives me replacement characters (boxes or question marks). I think I've narrowed it down to those instances where the script in question uses glyph rearranging features, like with combining characters and the like. For instance if I try to input devanagari (देवनागरी), accented Greek (ἐλληνικῆ) or Latin script with more "exotic" diacriticals (ṃḁśāŭǫṝḱḥm̊q̣̇). I have no problems writing these letters in any other unicode-enabled context. The really weird thing is that I can easily paste these into mIRC and then they'll show up fine - I just can't input them directly into the mIRC channel editbox for some reason.

[edit: Ok, this obviously got garbled into HTML entities, but I'll attribute that to this web forum as I do not normally have any problems writing unicode.]

Another somewhat odd problem I've noticed concerns the Windows function of shifting between installed keyboards. One can of course switch by cliking the icon in the language band and chosing another keyboard, but Windows also allows one to switch by using keyboard shortcuts (in my case left CTRL+SHIFT) which is much preferrable. This works fine, except in mIRC, where it displays some weird behaviour. I normally have five keyboards installed and by pressing this keyboard shortcut, it'll change through them one at a time. But in mIRC, it'll change only between two of them. Say I'm writing something in Danish, I press the shortcut to change to Greek, press it once more, it goes to Hebrew. Then when I press it again, it would normally go through Japanese, Devanagari and then back to Danish, but in mIRC it doesn't - it just keeps changing between Greek and Hebrew, and I have to use the mouse and the language band button to switch back to my standard Danish keyboard layout.

I know this is a bit of a mouthful, but I couldn't seem to find anyone else reporting these issues. I'm kind of fearing that if it isn't a problem specific to my setup or computer, it might be one of those things that'll require a more thorough rewriting of mIRC and cannot be easily fixed, but I'm very interested in hearing what you have to say on this matter.

(I am using mIRC 6.2 on a WinXP SP2.)

/Rasmus