The recent discussions under 'Character Encodings' and other related subjects 
brought me back to some questions:

1. Is there an actual property of an LC field that can be examined 
programmatically to show whether the field works as a Unicode string or not? (I 
know there 'unicodeText', which is a property of a text string, but not 
actually of a field AFAIKS).

2. How does the mechanism (which I apparently unearthed using Richmond's little 
Unicode-querying utility) work whereby a non-Unicode character string appended 
to a Unicode string in an LC field itself becomes Unicode? Is everything made 
into two-byte characters? I assume this is the case, but I want to be sure. 
Experiments with Richmond's utility are confusing - the whole string appears to 
be Unicode if one explicitly Unicode character is present; but if that 
character is deleted while the others remain, it seems that the string stops 
being Unicode - this is scarcely credible, but it's what I seem to be seeing.

3. If I paste one of the Mac-only 'special' non-straight-ascii characters 
(Mac-Roman - like the square root character) into a Unicode string, will it end 
up as the Unicode version of the same symbol? I think not, so some kind of 
pre-filtering would be needed using platform knowledge before allowing the 
characters in the field to be parsed as Unicode.

My objective as before is to allow a user to type or paste text into a field 
from any reasonable source, such as a text processor (any platform), a web page 
or maybe a Tex document, and for non-ascii characters like pi, square root etc 
to be included, with the whole field always ending up as Unicode (you can see 
I'm interested in mathematical stuff, but this could also work for other 
languages and special characters). The recent discussions make me doubt the 
feasibility of this. Does anyone know exactly what the mother ship is planning 
in respect of 'promoting' non-Unicode character strings to Unicode?

TIA

Graham
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