How to use some characters of 'symbola'

[Jeremy H. Griffith]

On Sun, 8 Jan 2012 14:51:28 +0100, Michael Böhme <boehme at gmx.de> wrote:

>I have a problem using the unicode font 'symbola.ttf':
>http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/font/symbola/index.htm
>
>I installed this font, and it works well in Microsoft Word. What I looked
>for was a symbol for a steam locomotive (and other).
>The unicode sequence is 1F682.
>
>I tried to insert this symbol into my FM 9 document with PopChar 5.2, but
>the result was a '?' only.
>The file>utilities>Character palette of FM9 does not show these symbol, but
>shows other characters of the 'symbola' font. These other characters I can
>enter into my FM9-document.
>
>What is the underlying problem?

The underlying problem is that Frame does not actually
support Unicode.  It supports only one part of it, the
BMP (Basic Multilingual Plane), which is from U+0000 to
U+FFFF.  It does not support the "ästral" planes, above
0xFFFF, and your character is on Plane 1, SMP (Supplementary
Multilingual Plane).  We've had the same problem with
customers using Plane 2, the SIP (Supplementary Ideographic 
Plane), which contains (among others) Chinese Han characters 
that didn't make it into the BMP during Han unification.

Frame does *store* the characters, using 4-byte UTF-8 
encoding, but will not display them, just a placeholder
(the question mark or a space) instead.  However, if you
export to HTML using Mif2Go (and possibly other apps), 
the characters will appear in the output, and anyone 
with that font installed can see them in their browser.

>What exactly I have to do, to insert my steam locomotive?

Good question.  You can copy/paste from somewhere that
shows them, like Word, but since they are invisible in
Frame, they will be hard to work with.  I'd suggest a
character-sized image instead, in an in-line anchored 
frame.  

Maybe someday Frame will *really* support the full
Unicode Standard, but I am not optimistic about that.
I brought it up in the last two betas I was in, and
the only response was I was left out of the next beta.
La, la, la, la, we can't hear you.  ;-)

HTH!

-- Jeremy H. Griffith, at Omni Systems Inc.
  <jeremy at omsys.com>  http://www.omsys.com/