[With permission from Microsoft], I had the help file for the Extension A & B IME/font that ships with Office XP (CHS and Hong Kong editions) translated into English, those who are interested in reading a bit on Microsoft's efforts to provide an IME to handle these characters can see it here:
http://www.i18nwithvb.com/surrogate_ime/ (no warranty about the translation or even the original text, of course!) Now, most people will be more interested in the code charts that are included in the help file, reproduced in this online version (divided into the same 16 parts as the help file does). They can be found at http://www.i18nwithvb.com/surrogate_ime/code_charts/ There are three ways to load each page: 1) DEFAULT -- the tables are loaded with the font specified as "Simsun (Founder Extended)" -- the font that ships with the CHS and HK versions of Office XP. 2) NO FONT SPECIFIED -- the tables are loaded with no font specified -- good for people who do not have the font on their machine and have hope that their browser will make up for this with an alternate font. 3) EOT -- the tables are loaded with an EOT file produced by WEFT -- good for people who do not have the font but do have IE and so have a hope that the EOT files will allow one to see the characters.... You will want to pay attention to the instructions on that default "code charts" page on the configuration where I was able to verify that these pages are rendered properly -- every other browser and OS combination I tried would have some type of failure, in whole or part. It was not my personal choice to prove that IE seems to have superior support for Extension A and B, but I was unable to get either of the non-IE browsers I tried to do such a hot job here. Even the IE case required Win2000 or XP, properly set up for supplementary characters. The two most interesting failures (IMHO): 1) Mozilla 0.9.3 -- Almost all of Ext. A shows up as question mark (?) and all Ext B shows up as a double question mark (??) -- these are *not* corrupted chars though -- copy and paste to Unicode notepad proves that the actual characters are present, Mozilla is just using ? or ?? instead of the default char. like it should be. Very weird and unexpected, to me at least. :-) 2) IE >= 5.0 on machine set up for surrogate support and with font on machine but without the font specified -- almost all of extension A is not visible but all of extension B is -- I have been told this by various font experts outside of MS that this is a known bug with displaying Extension A characters in IE without the font explicitly specified. Enjoy! MichKa Michael Kaplan Trigeminal Software, Inc. http://www.trigeminal.com/
