Character Sets

Most TrueType fonts shipped with Windows NT 4.0 suport multiple Windows character sets used in various countries or regions. Some (such as Europe and the United States) are single-byte sets, and others (such as Asia) are double-byte sets. This enables the Windows NT user to switch language keyboards and type in different alphabets, including Roman, Cyrillic, Arabic, and Far East Asian alphabets. The following is a list of the character sets supported by Windows NT 4.0:

• ANSI_CHARSET

• DEFAULT_CHARSET

• SYMBOL_CHARSET

• SHIFTJIS_CHARSET

• HANGEUL_CHARSET

• GB2312_CHARSET

• CHINESEBIG5_CHARSET

• OEM_CHARSET

• JOHAB_CHARSET

• GREEK_CHARSET

• TURKISH_CHARSET

• VIETNAMESE_CHARSET

• THAI_CHARSET

• EASTEUROPE_CHARSET

• RUSSIAN_CHARSET

A character set contains punctuation marks, numerals, uppercase and lowercase letters, and all other printable characters. Each element of a character set is identified by a number.

Most character sets used in Windows are supersets of the U.S. ASCII character set, which defines characters for the 96 numeric values from 32 through 127. There are five major groups of character sets:

• Windows

• Unicode

• OEM (original equipment manufacturer)

• Symbol

• Vendor-specific