Charles:
There's a little more to your query that the responses so far
haven't touch on: when you see \u-3999 in the RTF file, the
number after the \u is a decimal representation of a *signed*
16-bit integer. In other words, if you see the minus sign, add
65536 to the number. In this case, you get 61537, = xF061.
Now, if you look up U+F061, you'll find that it's in the middle
of the Private Use Area. Why? Well, back when Microsoft
introduced TrueType fonts, they decided that they wanted to use
Unicode internal to the font, but they needed some way to deal
with things like symbols and dingbats - such a character might
not ever be assigned a Unicode value. The solution they adopted
was to allow two flavours of TrueType fonts: symbol-encoded,
and "WGL" or "UGL". The latter use only standard Unicode
character allocations, and can contain large numbers of glyphs.
The former have all the glyphs accessed in the font using the
PUA sub-range U+F020 - U+F0FF. If Windows detects that a font
is a "symbol" font (charset 2), then it will map 8-bit codes
x20 - xFF to xF020 - xF0FF by adding xF000. So, what you're
looking at is a character that's formatted with a symbol font.
In fact, the Symbol font that ships with Windows has a Greek
alpha at xF061.
Peter Constable
Non-Roman Script Initiative, SIL
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Tue Jul 10 2001 - 17:20:45 EDT