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.