Windows 95/98/ME

Windows 95/98/ME

Unfortunately these Windows versions do not include full Unicode capabilities on the operating system layer. Instead support for non-roman writing-systems is provided through so-called code-pages that contain all the required characters mapped to either the available byte-values in the range of 0x80 to 0xFF (in case of single-byte systems, such as Cyrillic or Hebrew) or as double-byte values, where the first most significant bit of the first byte is typically used to indicate that this is a so-called "wide character" (in case of CJK writing-systems).

Therefore we are providing a special Windows 95/98/ME version of XML Spy that is automatically installed whenever you are using the Setup program on these operating systems. This version of XML Spy supports the following code-pages for viewing and editing XML documents (for excellent background information about code-pages please refer to http://czyborra.com/charsets/codepages.html):

	Code-page Equivalent XML Encoding
	1252 ISO-8859-1 (Western, Latin-1)
	1250 ISO-8859-2 (Eastern Europe, Latin-2)
	1251 ISO-8859-5 (Cyrillic)
	1253 ISO-8859-7 (Greek)
	1254 ISO-8859-9 (Turkish)
	1255 ISO-8859-8 (Hebrew)
	1256 ISO-8859-6 (Arabic)
	874 ISO-8859-11/TIS-620 (Thai)
	932 Shift-JIS (Japanese)
	936 GB2312 (Chinese)
	949 EUC-KR (Korean)
	950 Big5 (Taiwanese)

Whenever you open an XML file, XML Spy detects the character-set encoding used in that file, expands the file to an internal full Unicode representation and then transforms the document to a code-page supported by Windows 95/98 in order to enable viewing and editing of the document.

In most cases this process will be entirely automatic, as the available ISO-8895-x encodings as well as some of the CJK encodings often correspond with a certain code-page. However, if you open a Unicode encoded file (e.g. UTF-8 or UTF-16) XML Spy will be unable to determine which code-page to use and will thus bring up a dialog that asks you to specify a code-page to be used for editing.

In order to correctly view and edit a Unicode file under Windows 95/98/ME it is extremely important that you use this dialog to:

	a) choose the correct code-page that includes all characters contained in the file and
	b) later select a font and script from the settings dialog that also supports the same code-page.

If the file contains any characters that are not available in the selected code-page, the user will receive an error message including a detailed list of offending characters before they will be replaced by a '_' (under-score).

We therefore highly recommend using only the Windows NT/2000 version of XML Spy for editing XML files that make full use of Unicode!