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language - Specific characters displaying as boxes in Windows 7


I'm currently experiencing issues with "exotic" unicode characters that are displayed as boxes (for example, Bananas ).


I've searched a bit how to extend Windows character set, but didn't find anything working yet. I've tried to play with language packs, but when trying this, I simply don't see these updates in the Optional tab, nor do I see, in Regions and Languages > Keyboard and Languages, a box under Keyboard and other input languages with the title Display language.


I then would like to know how can I extend the character set supported by Windows.


Is that even a matter of language, or a matter of font ?



Answer



There is really no “Windows character set” to extend. Characters like BANANA (U+1F34C) are recognized and processed, they just aren’t displayed, because no font in the system contains it or, depending on program and context, the font(s) being used by the rendering software do(es) not contain it.


So it’s a font issue. Some language packs may contain additional fonts (though I doubt that), but BANANA isn’t language-specific but an icon-like character. The page that you link to has a link to Fonts that support U+1F34C. Such links at Fileformat.Info are often very useful, but for very new characters like this, there might be some information missing. In this case, the page mentions just the free font Symbola (LastResort isn’t a real font), but in reality, sufficiently new versions of Segoe UI Symbol have BANANA, too.


Segoe UI Symbol is shipped with Windows 7, but the version you have might not be the newest one, so check for the update available from Microsoft.


For different exotic characters, you may need different exotic fonts.


Note that characters with Unicode numbers larger than FFFF (such as BANANA, which has 1F34C) are outside the “16-bit subspace” of Unicode, called Basic Multilingual Plane (BMP) and often cause problems in software that is not capable of handling it, or require special measures.


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