Question

I have included a couple of unicode arrows in my SWT Java UI and have just noticed that my Windows XP machine doesn’t render these characters.

XP :

7 :

Does Windows XP not support unicode UI text or do I need to do something special to enable support?

Answer 1

The key issue here is that the default XP UI font is Tahoma which has a very limited set of characters. This can be seen by opening the Character Map application.

This issue can be worked around by choosing appropriate characters when the UI font is Tahoma. I chose these chars:

private static final String UP = "\u25B2";
private static final String DOWN = "\u25BC";
private static final String RIGHT = "\u25BA";

private static final String TAHOMA_UP = "\u06F8";
private static final String TAHOMA_DOWN = "\u06F7";
private static final String TAHOMA_RIGHT = "\u003E";

I detected which contacts to use with this single line of code.

boolean tahomaUIFont = composite.getFont().getFontData()[0].getName().equalsIgnoreCase("tahoma");