(Note: You need to have Far East or MS Arial Unicode fonts installed in order to view some parts of this page.) Download file at bottom of this page.

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UnicodeViewer is a freeware program to enable you to view Unicode characters on the screen. It is a very simple program which displays the Unicode characters and its associated code (in hex and decimal).

I wrote this program to assist me in designing my Chinese Lunar calendar program Lunarcal. You may wish to visit LunarCal.

All characters available in the selected font is shown. Presently only the following fonts are recognized:

Arial MS Unicode
MS Hei
MS Song
Ming Liu

Although there are other Unicode fonts, I do not have a copy of them so I am unable to check it out. The above are True Type fonts and are supplied with your copy of WinXP. With the exception of MS Arial Unicode, the remaining fonts are also supplied with your Windows CD. These fonts are generally not installed by default. You need to check out the Value Added folder and then install Far East support in order to have the fonts installed.

Below is a sample screen of MS Arial Unicode font.

Here's a snapshot of MS Song, MS Hei and Ming Liu fonts as displayed by UnicodeViewer program. You can return here by clicking on your browser's <- key (left arrow key).

Invalid Characters

All invalid characters are displayed as Invalid characters are characters or symbols that are not encoded in the font file and there's nothing we can do about. There are many missing "holes" in the above font files. These include Braille, Yi-syllable, etc.

How to Read the Unicode's Character Code

Characters are displayed in a 10 rows x 16 column matrix. Each row is labelled with the row's starting hex code. Each column is labelled 0 thru F. (Note: in hex A=10, B=11, C=12, D=13, E=14, F=15)

To obtain the character code just append the column code to the row's hex code. For example, the 1st row character  is 0x688 appended with 0 becomes 0x6880. The last character in the 1st row above has a character code of 0x688f.

To obtain the decimal code you have to actually add the value to the decimal row code shown on extreme right. Eg. The 1st character has decimal code of 26752+0 = 26752. The last character on 1st row has decimal code of 26752+15 = 26767.

How to Navigate

Upon startup, the program will display a page of unicode characters using MS Arial Unicode font.

To popup a menu, RIGHT CLICK mouse when pointing at the program display screen. This is known as a context menu. All my programs uses such menus as it makes the program neater though a little more involved in programming.

Right click will popup menu: 

You can select another font - MS Song, MS Hei, Ming Liu. Or you can select to display a particular code page:

To view other characters just hit PageUp or PageDn or use your mouse roller control. The screen below shows what code pages are available:

There are shortcut keys to the above code pages. Eg. M=mathematical, etc. Just explore in your own time. You can also selectively enter a particular hex or decimal code and UnicodeViewer will display a full page beginning with that code value. TO enter hex code hit 'X' on keyboard or hit 'D' to enter decimal code. For hex codes, you may just enter the code itself such as 123f without leading 0x.

Beware! Not all codepages are available. Presently I am using the MS Arial Unicode v1 font and it only implements v3 of the Unicode Consortium's standard. Missing codepages include Braille, Kangxi Radicals, YI Syllables, etc.

How to use Unicode in your Web Page

My name in chinese is 梁錦華 (displayed in MS Arial Unicode) and comprises of the following sequence of 3 hex codes: 0x6881 0x9326 0x83ef or 26753, 37670, 33775 in decimal. If you do not have MS Arial Unicode font, then you will see 3 square boxes or inverted ? signs above instead of my Chinese name.

You can encode such characters in your web page by using:-

<font face="Arial Unicode MS" size="4">My name is &#26753;&#37670;&#33775;</font>

will display "My name is 梁錦華"

or just

My name is &#26753;&#37670;&#33775;

will display "My name is 梁錦華" (notice the font is different. We did not specify a font so   IE just selected a similar font - MS Hei)

Note: You must use the decimal code value and prefix the code with &# and terminate the character with a semicolon ;

To display mathematical symbol PI (code 0x220f or 8719 decimal), code as follows: &#8719; which will display ∏

Have fun!

Download UnicodeViewer v2 program (size 25k only! No install required. Just execute from any folder.)