On Windows, how do you enter a character outside of the Unicode Basic Multilingual Plane?

Question

I know that Windows supports additional aircraft with Windows XP.

I have fonts that I know have characters outside the base multilingual plane (BMP).

For these characters, the Unicode encoding code consists of five hexadecimal digits.

I do not know how to enter these characters in applications.

Windows seems to support only character input in BMP. You can enter a decimal number, or some applications allow you to enter a four-digit hexadecimal number.

Can anyone confirm how the record is managed? I do not care if it is directly from the keyboard or using the application. (By default, the "Character Map" Windows application only supports characters in BMP, so I need suggestions - it is desirable that the application supports at least Unicode Version 5, if not 6.)

In Java, these characters are controlled using "surrogate pairs" in UTF-16. I am concerned that Windows may also have part of the old “Unicode 16 bit”, which leads to a similar problem. Even receiving confirmation that I need to break through the numbers of surrogate pairs would be the answer.

Thanks!

Answer 1

Well, I don’t know exactly what you are talking about.

In any case, referring to:

By default, the Character Map application of Windows only supports characters in BMP, so I need suggestions - it is desirable that the application supports at least Unicode Version 5, if not 6.

I found a link to an application that might help.

http://www.babelstone.co.uk/software/babelpad.html

Download it and select the Tools menu → then the symbol map.

Hope this helps.

If you do not regret the misunderstanding, just intending to help.

Answer 2

Now I have created a small utility that can be used in a web browser in different ways: A complete Unicode input utility . It looks like a character map in Windows, but allows you to access all Unicode planes and get selected characters assembled in an area from which they can be copied as a whole. A little quick and dirty, but functional.

Answer 3

At least in MS Word 2007, the Alt + X method also works for non-BMP characters: enter U +, then the Unicode number in hexadecimal, then Alt + X. U + characters can be omitted if the previous character is not a number or the letter AF or X. You may need to explicitly select a font for the text (that is, Word does not necessarily switch to a font containing a character, as is usual with BMP characters).

In Word, you can also use the Insert → Symbol command, and then in the insert window, select the font containing the character you want.

Using UnicodeInput , you can enter a character by pressing Alt ++, and then enter the Unicode number. It also does not support BMP, but with an odd restriction due to a program error: it does not work for characters without BMP if the fourth digit on the right is a letter (for example, U + 1B000).

BabelPad, mentioned in Martins' answer, is a great alternative and allows you to select characters both by number and by Unicode name.

Perhaps there are other Unicode editors that allow you to work with BMP; Check out Unicode's Alan Woods list and multilingual programs and utilities .

Answer 4

I will shamelessly plug in a small tool that I wrote for typing characters in Windows, as I find any solution that usually seems too cumbersome for daily frequent use. My personal use case is to write the Swedish language, for example, on an international American keyboard without having to switch layouts.

It allows you to enter Unicode characters through a pop-up window, no different from how it works in Apple OS X.

See https://github.com/mjvh80/SymWin for more details, free and open source, but you must (currently) compile it. If there is enough interest, I can add a pre-built version.

A tool can be customized for each key, for example. by copying / pasting characters once from a site, for example http://copypastecharacter.com .