Unicode Support Information

Support for Unicode varies wildly among different applications. Very few applications available today provide full support for the entire Unicode character set, so this page is an attempt to provide some information as to which applications and operating systems can support Unicode.

Please visit The Unicode Home Page for more information on what Unicode is.

Operating Systems

Windows 2000
Windows 2000 currently provides the best support for Unicode of any of the Microsoft Windows family, including support for supplementary plane characters (the characters above U+FFFF). The standard encoding form is UTF-16, and very few applications support anything other than plane 0 (U+0001 - U+FFFF).

Windows NT 4
I believe that Windows NT 4 does not support supplementary plane characters but cannot find any documentation on this. Apart from this, it handles Unicode reasonably well, certainly far better than the Windows 95/98 range.

Windows 95/98/Me
Windows 95, 98 and Me all have very limited Unicode support. Keyman improves on this support by including the WM_UNICHAR message which allows conformant applications, such as the new RichEdit control Microsoft is including with Office XP, to accept Unicode input in Windows 95/98. However, unless specifically stated, it is unlikely that you will be able to use Unicode to its full potential on these operating systems. There is no system support for supplementary planes.

Applications

Microsoft Office 97
Office 97 under Windows 2000 supports Unicode plane 0 reasonably well. Word 97 supports Unicode input with Keyman and the WordLink add-in under all of the above-mentioned operating systems. Otherwise, Unicode support is dependent on operating system: Under Windows NT, Windows 2000, and Windows XP, Office 97 applications handle Unicode without trouble.

Microsoft Office 2000
Appears to be equivalent to Office 97; still no support for characters above plane 0.

Microsoft Office XP
Supports Unicode under WinNT, Win2k, and WinXP; also under Win9x with WordLink. Office XP supports supplementary plane characters.

WordPad/Write
Recent versions of WordPad (specifically, the "RichEdit" control) support Unicode input in all operating systems, using Keyman. The RichEdit control must be version 3.0 or later. An update is available on this website at System Requirements. Older versions support Unicode plane 0 input under Windows NT, 2000.

UltraEdit-32, EmEditor
These two editors, available from www.ultraedit.com and www.emurasoft.com respectively, support (or will support in the upcoming versions) Unicode input from Keyman under all the above operating systems using WM_UNICHAR.