Forums Bug Reports Unicode support thing

I thoguht having unicode supprt built in now, with the decode/encode options would mean mirc now supported unicode characters in all fonts windows does?

I work have with Access and other apps and they all display japanese characters using Arial, or most other opentype or truetype fonts in winXP, but in mirc even with the encode/decode unicode options turned on i still have to select a font like simsun and choose japanese character set ???

It's not that simple. The basic text output functions in Windows are oblivious to font linking. Font linking means picking characters from another font when the selected font does not have them. You have to use a special API called Uniscribe for the font linking to work with all fonts. However, starting from Windows 2000, some fonts like Tahoma enable automatic font linking so the application doesn't need to care about it. Tahoma can display just about anything. That is, if I pick Tahoma in mIRC, I can see European text, Japanese text etc. just fine. I think Vista will further improve this functionality.

Still, the Unicode support in mIRC basically does what is advertised and at least outputs and inputs UTF-8 correctly. Whether the characters show up or not is a secondary issue ;-) I actually think the support is good enough to be enabled by default (and also multibyte editbox & display should be enabled by default). Meaning mIRC should output UTF-8 by default ;-) The faster the world moves to UTF-8, the less problems there will be wrt character sets overall.