windowsunicodeastral-plane

In Windows, how do you enter a character outside of the Unicode Basic Multilingual Plane?


I know that Windows has supported supplemental planes since Windows XP.

I have fonts which I know have characters outside the basic multilingual plane (BMP).

For these characters, the Unicode codepoint consists of five hexadecimal digits.

I do not know how to enter these characters in applications.

Windows seems to only support keyboard entry of characters in the BMP. You can either enter a decimal number or some applications allow you to enter a four digit hexadecimal number.

Can someone confirm how entry is managed? I don't care if it directly from the keyboard or application-assisted. (The default Windows "Character Map" application only supports characters in the BMP, so I need suggestions -- preferably to an application supporting at least Unicode Version 5, if not 6.)

In Java, these characters are managed using "surrogate pairs" in UTF-16. I'm concerned that Windows may also have some of the old "Unicode is 16 bit" legacy, causing to have a similar issue. Even getting confirmation that I need to punch in surrogate pair numbers would be an answer.

Thanks!


Solution

  • Ok, i clearly do not know what are you talking about.

    Anyway, refering to:

    The default Windows "Character Map" application only supports characters in the BMP, so I need suggestions -- preferably to an application supporting at least Unicode Version 5, if not 6.

    I've found a link to an application that could help.

    https://www.babelstone.co.uk/Software/BabelPad.html

    Download it, and select menu Tools -> then Character map.

    Hope it could help.

    If not sorry for the missunderstanding, just intending to help.