Higher Unicode characters

Sorry about all the questions, but I figured it would be easier to have all
my Unicode inquiries under oen roof! This way, uninterested parties can just
skip the one post...

Can someone explain something regarding unicode? Or, if such an explanation
were to be too involved, point me toward web ressources to help me
understand.

I have to work with documents written in Simplified/Traditional Chinese (by
the way, I heard that simplified is Mandarin and that Traditional is
Cantonese.... why not use Mandarin and Cantonese?), Korean, Japanese and
Hebrew.
Occasionally, when exchaning documents with other co-workers, it happens
that one person cannot open a document because Word reports that it cannot
read the characters and it pops up the Unicode conversion dialogue box. I
have never been able to use that dialogue box to succesfully convert
characters... Whenever I see that dialogue, I pretty much know that the
document has become useless. So, why would a document saved in Word by one
person become unreadable for another person also using Word?

Also, once the characters have been written, why is it that applying a font
will not work? If there are characters in Simsun, the only way I can change
font is use another "Chinese-compatible" font, like PMingLiu. I mean, I
understand that Verdana may not be able to render Chinese characters, but if
I apply Verdana to Simsun, I would expect to see white squares instead of the
characters. But no, Word will not even apply the font. However, I can apply
Simsun to Roman characters previously formatted with a non-Chinese font, like
Arial.

I am not sure that these will appear, but here goes 4 Chinese characters
(Simplified Chinese):

飞机票价 (air fare)

The third one is unicode 31080 as repoted by the AscW function.
Anywhere in a Word document, regardless of the font at the current insertion
point, if I do ALT+3180, I get 票 in Simsun. Why don't I get the Arial version
of unicode 31080 (Assuming Arial ws the current font at the insertion point)?
Why do I get "h" in this Web inbterface instead of 票 when I do ALT+31080?

Finally, when using the AscW function, why is the reported Unicode number
often a negative one? The first of the four character is Unicode 39134 but
AscW reports that it is -26402. Why can't the VBA compiler add 65536 to get
the proper answer? I have not found any reference to negative code on
http://www.unicode.org/charts/, so why does the AscW report useless
information?

Thank you for you patience and generosity!

Hi Jean-Guy,

Can't answer everything... Just some parts.

As to the last question:
> Finally, when using the AscW function, why is the reported Unicode number
> often a negative one? The first of the four character is Unicode 39134 but
> AscW reports that it is -26402. Why can't the VBA compiler add 65536 to
> get
> the proper answer? I have not found any reference to negative code on
> http://www.unicode.org/charts/, so why does the AscW report useless
> information?

see Jay's and my replies to Dave Rado at the end of this thread:
http://groups.google.de/group/microsoft.public.word.word97vba/browse_t...ad/thre

Basically, VBA hasn't the proper type of integers (unsigned double-byte) for
Unicode, so it fudges along using signed two-byte integers.
If you work with Unicode, you're usually better off using hex notation
anyway, and both Hex(39134) and Hex(-26402) will give you the same hex code
(98DE).
The other way round, you also have an easier time using hex notation
(iCode=&H98DE instead of iCode=39134).

Klaus