The Font Charset Property

Glossary

Charset: A set of characters used in Windows. Charsets refer to the same collections of characters defined by Windows code pages, but their ID numbers can be expressed in a single byte.
Big font: A single font file that contains glyphs representing characters from multiple charsets.

Western European editions of Windows 3.x supported three character sets per installation: a single Windows character set (ANSI), an OEM character set, and the symbol character set. Because different language editions of Windows 3.1 supported different default Windows and OEM character sets, sharing documents among different systems was not always feasible. (See Chapter 3 for more information on character sets in Windows.) The mapping between character sets and code pages is shown in Figure 6-5 below.

*Charset Name*	Charset Value (Hex)	Charset Value (Decimal)	Code-Page ID
ANSI_CHARSET	0x00	0	1252
DEFAULT_CHARSET	0x01	1
SYMBOL_CHARSET	0x02	2
SHIFTJIS_CHARSET	0x80	128	932
HANGUL_CHARSET	0x81	129	949
GB2312_CHARSET	0x86	134	936
CHINESEBIG5_CHARSET	0x88	136	950
GREEK_CHARSET	0xA1	161	1253
TURKISH_CHARSET	0xA2	162	1254
HEBREW_CHARSET	0xB1	177	1255
ARABIC_CHARSET	0xB2	178	1256
BALTIC_CHARSET	0xBA	186	1257
RUSSIAN_CHARSET	0xCC	204	1251
THAI_CHARSET	0xDE	222	874
EE_CHARSET	0xEE	238	1250
OEM_CHARSET	0xFF	255

Figure 6-5 Windows 95 charsets.

Note that DEFAULT_CHARSET is not a real charset; rather, it is a constant akin to NULL that means "show characters in whatever charsets are available." The meaning of OEM_CHARSET varies from locale to locale as well.