Configuring Windows Vista Aero

If you’re not a big fan of the translucent glass effects provided by Windows Vista Aero but would still like to take advantage of the other unique features and reliability offered by this user experience, take heart. Microsoft has nicely provided a handy configuration utility to Aero that enables you to fine-tune how it looks. This functionality is available via the Personalization section of the Control Panel. The quickest way to get there is to right-click a blank area of the desktop, choose Properties, and then select Windows Color and Appearance from the Personalize appearance and sound effects control panel. This window, enables you to change various aspects of Aero’s visual style. First, you can pick between preset color choices by selecting one of the color scheme swatches shown at the top of the window. You can also disable transparent glass (really translucency) or vary the intensity of the translucency to meet your liking. Finally, you can expand the Show color mixer option and apply varying levels of color, saturation, and brightness to achieve just the look and feel you want.

How Windows Jumped from 224 Glyphs to 652 to 100,000

When Microsoft incorporated TrueType font technology into Windows 3.1, a particular set of 224 characters was present in almost every font that shipped with the operating system. This was known as the Windows ANSI character set. Installed for users in the United States and Western Europe, these characters met most Westerners’ word-processing needs (when used with an appropriate keyboard, for example, U.S., U.K., French, and so forth).

These 224 characters, however, were frustrating for most of the rest of the people in the world. Many characters that are essential to write Eastern European languages were missing from the English install of the operating system. And speakers of Asian languages, such as Japanese, Chinese, and Korean, were even more at a loss to use Windows for communication in the languages they were familiar with. Microsoft and other software companies tried to fill this gap with various add-on products. Ultimately, Windows had to expand its character set. Beginning with Windows 95, and continuing with more fervor in Windows 98, Microsoft started including fonts that contained 652 characters. This expanded set of glyphs was called WGL4—the Windows Glyph List 4.

It was considered a PanEuropean character set, because each font contained characters needed by Eastern European, Greek, Turkish, and Cyrillic language groups as well as speakers of Western European languages. Most keyboards still bore the same number of keys. But users of non-Western European languages could purchase localized keyboards and easily configure Windows to use the appropriate character set. Beginning in Windows 2000, and continuing through Windows XP and Windows Vista, Microsoft began to build a much larger character set into Windows. This is known as Unicode, a movement with its own international standards bodies. Unicode was originally conceived to support up to 65,000 glyphs, allowing thousands of Asian ideograms to have their own place in the standard. This set of glyphs is known as the Basic Multilingual Plane or, for short, Plane 0. Even this wasn’t enough—scholars have identified more than 1 million unique glyphs used by all the world’s people at one time or another—so Unicode was expanded to handle an additional 16 planes of 65,000 characters each (Supplementary Planes 1 through 16). Today, 100,000 or so glyphs have places reserved for them in official Unicode documentation, though no font yet exists that is capable of rendering them all.

Making Progress in International Communications

An overview of Windows’ evolution in fonts shows a continuous increase in the size of the language groups the operating system can support.

Windows ANSI

Windows 3.1’s original character set is called Windows ANSI, although the specification was never formally made a standard by ANSI (the American National Standards Institute). The new 224-character range was an improvement on US-ASCII, a 7-bit code used by older computers, which offered only 96 printable characters out of a possible 128. The first 32 positions were reserved for control codes (such as Tab and Line Feed).

Windows ANSI also retains the same 32 control codes, leaving 224 printable characters available out of the 256 that are possible in an 8-bit scheme. Windows ANSI was designed by Microsoft as a superset (some would say an incompatible set) of ISO-8859-1, a specification of the International Standards Organization that ANSI did at one time adopt. ISO-8859-1 reserved 32 positions in the middle of its 8-bit series for control codes (such as CCH, cancel character). Microsoft Windows fonts instead used these positions for printable characters, such as the trademark symbol (TM) and curly quotes. This conflict of character codes still haunts Windows users, as we’ll discuss later in this article. Windows ANSI is also known as Windows-1252 (one of several code pages that are used to define the character encoding used in an HTML document) and Latin-1 (because it includes many of the characters of the Latin or Roman alphabet that’s used in Western countries).

Unicode: One Font to Rule Them All

The answer to the confusion over which characters are available in Windows—and whether all Windows users can see those characters when viewing and printing a document prepared by someone using a different PC—is Unicode. This project, which attempts to collect and standardize every character that every language group in the world uses, is a massive effort. According to David McCreedy, who manages the TravelPhrases.info web site and maintains a huge font list, there are more than 1,100 fonts available that contain at least some multilingual Unicode characters. None of these fonts, however, includes every possible glyph.

Lucida Sans Unicode, which has been included in every Microsoft operating system since NT 4 and Windows 95, includes about 1,776 glyphs, surpassing WGL4. Microsoft’s Arial Unicode MS, which is included with Office 2000/XP/2003/2007, comes close to covering the Unicode range with more than 50,000 glyphs, McCreedy says. Meanwhile, these and other fonts seem to add to their character sets every day (as we’ll describe later in this article). How can you use all these characters? Think about it. Perhaps you really should be including a copyright or a trademark symbol in your documents. Hmmm, these characters don’t appear on your keyboard. We’ll show you how to master this challenge and much more.

How to Enter ANSI Characters from the Keyboard

The characters are numbered 32 through 127 and 0128 through 0255. The numbers above 127, representing characters that don’t appear on a U.S.-style keyboard, required you in previous versions of Windows to enter a leading zero to access them via the numeric keypad. (More on this shortly.) The leading zero is no longer necessary if you’re using the keypad to enter these characters in Vista. The first glyph in each row represents the character you’ll see when an ordinary text font, such as Arial or Times New Roman, is selected. The second glyph is visible if Windows’ Symbol font is selected.

The third glyph is from Wingdings, a whimsical dingbats font Microsoft threw into the mix to add some spice to its first rollout of TrueType. If you’re using a version of Windows from Windows 3.1 on up, and it has a Western code page configured, then you have these characters. They aren’t much. U.S. users don’t even see a way on their keyboards to type a symbol for the pound currency (£) or a registered trademark (®). But they’re there, and they do the job if you’re writing a document in a major Western European language.

This article was published on Thursday 04 June, 2009.