Forums mIRC Help font problem

I have been having a problem, and I am unsure if it is exactly mIRC related or not. For starters, I'll post this: \(｡◕‿◕｡)/
That is a smiley that I can no longer see in mIRC. First thing I did was post it in Microsoft Word to see it. It was messed up, and it turns out I somehow lost the font it goes to, called MS Gothic. I got the font back and now it shows on Word and here too, but it does not show on mIRC. Several smileys and other fancy stuff do not show as well. The only way I found to fix this was to change the font from Fixedsys to MS Gothic, which is something I've never had to do before. This has only started to happen since the update. I am unsure whether or not this is a bug, since other people using mIRC are seeing these just fine where I am not, and they have updated just like me. Could someone help with my issue and explain the cause? It would be greatly appreciated. In case it makes any difference, my opperating system is windows XP.

what matters more is what version of mirc your running. If your running the current release (7.1x) then the program is now UNICODE not font orientated. Please start by letting us know what release of mIRC your running, then we can help from there.

Thanks

So, without addressing the specific characters in your smiley, mirc runs one font at a time per window. Change the font to MS Gothic and see if it works.

As long as a Unicode font is installed, it should display correctly regardless of what font is selected for the window. If no Unicode fonts are installed or if mIRC can't understand the Unicode font(s) that are installed, then it will have issues displaying some Unicode characters. Also, certain fonts that you can download are poorly made and may state that they have all the Unicode characters when they really don't. mIRC may try using the font linking to link to that font because the font says it has the characters, but since it doesn't, the character won't display.

Yes, I guess I should have told you guys about that. This did start right after I installed the latest update. This Unicode stuff, I know nothing about. I have switched it to MS Gothic to see, and yes, it does appear when I do so. What I don't understand is where this Unicode applies and such. Could you explain that, since I this MS Gothic is the only font I've installed in a very long time. Plus, I know for a fact that my friend, who updated when I did, is able to see it when I post it in our chat, yet I am not. This is what makes me think it isn't exactly mIRC related.

Unicode is a standard that allows displaying of characters from all languages in the world as well as many symbols and other characters. This replaces the old method where each language had a code page. Code pages used the same set of characters to display different alphabets. For example, what may have been the letter A in one code page may have been something like the letter  in another code page. That was fine unless you wanted to type in different languages at the same time. Unicode lets you use all languages at once without conflict and without having to continually change code pages. It's a much better method.

Many years ago, MS Gothic was one of the better fonts to display Japanese characters and became probably the most common font that people in the US used to display Japanese fonts. These days, any fully Unicode font can display the characters from every language in the world.

The 7.x series of mIRC is designed to make full use of the Unicode standard and has ceased to provide support for the rather outdated code pages. That being said, there are people and servers who do not support Unicode yet even though it's been around for plenty of time to start supporting it by now. Anyone who isn't using a server or IRC client that supports Unicode (or who have that support disabled) will not be able to use Unicode. Because mIRC only supports Unicode now, it will not be able to see what others type using code pages, nor can anyone who cannot view Unicode see what users of the new mIRC versions type. Khaled apparently feels that it's time for mIRC to move forward into the future instead of trying to maintain support for the past. That isn't a bad thing, but there are always going to be those who just refuse to change. For users affected by that, this can be frustrating. It leaves them with a choice of changing clients, servers, and/or channels. That itself can be difficult for some people to choose to do. Even so, that doesn't make moving forward a bad decision. For the majority of people, this is a good thing and most won't even notice anything different. Unicode has been around a long time and mIRC's supported it for a long time as well. Many users may have had it enabled and have been using it for years, so the change doesn't affect them in the least. Many others don't even use other languages, so Unicode won't affect them either.

As to your problem, I'd suggest trying to uninstall MS Gothic first and see if the problem goes away even though it works when you specify that font. If not, try other fonts that are not part of a default Windows installation. One of them is likely the cause of your problem. Once you know which one, you can re-install all of the rest. You might also want to look into downloading some good Unicode fonts such as Fixedsys Excelsior or Arial Unicode MS. I'm not sure if the last is free, but I believe it comes with MS Office and perhaps even newer versions of Windows. There are other free Unicode fonts as well if you want to check around.

Displays perfectly here ...
mIRC v7.14 (and v6.35)
Windows 7 64bit
Fixedsys Excelsior font