November 9, 2008

“Why can’t I see the symbols/characters like everyone else?”
“Why do my symbols/characters look like boxes, with numbers inside?”
“Why can’t I read the symbols/characters of other languages?”

The problem. Years ago, computers only had 128 characters: a-z, A-Z, punctuation, etc. They only spoke English. Few kool symbols. But that was then, this is now.

I’ll spare you the entire evolution from then to now, all you need to know is now we have Unicode (UTF-8) which gives us thousands more characters/symbols. From The Official Google Blog:

For the first time, we found that Unicode was the most frequent encoding found on web pages, overtaking both ASCII and Western European encodings.

So we have more characters/symbols now. How many? Over a hundred-thousand Unicode characters/symbols. But there’s only about 60,000 characters you really need, enough to cover all the modern languages. Most computers/websites won’t recognize much beyond this, otherwise known as “Plane 0″ or the “Basic Multilingual Plane”.

In HTML, that’s just about everything between ! and  where “xxx” in &#xxx; is the decimal number of the Unicode symbol/character you want represented. If you’re wondering,  looks like this: . By the way, forget about hexadecimal numbers, decimal is preferred for representing characters/symbols this way.

If you have an older version of Windows, you may not have most of the Basic Multilingual Plane, which is why you can’t see many of these kool symbols. To see these characters/symbols in the Firefox browser you first need to install Code2000.

How to install the Code2000 characters/symbols. Download the .ZIP file, here. Extract it. Remember where you extracted it, you’re going to need the directory in a minute. Now click your “Start” button, click “Settings / Control Panel”, and inside your Control Panel you will see “Fonts”, double-click it. Now you will see all the fonts you have installed, but guess what, none of them have the kool symbols/characters you want. Now click “File / Install New Font” and locate the directory where you extracted the Code2000.ZIP archive. Now you should see “Code2000 (TrueType)”. Select it and click “OK”. You’re done!

Almost like magic, all your incomplete fonts inherit the kool symbols/characters of Code2000, automatically. Even though you’re using Times New Roman (or whatever font) in Firefox, Windows is smart enough to grab the appropriate, missing Unicode characters from Code2000.

Now you have thousands and thousands of new characters/symbols to play with. Remember to tell your friends to get these characters. Otherwise they can’t see what you’re writing.

Note: I don’t know the maker of Code2000. It’s a “shareware font” which means the font is free but the maker is asking for a donation if you can afford it.