Starting with version 2.0 XML Spy provided full Unicode support in the Windows NT and Windows 2000 version of the software. To edit any XML document from a non-roman writing system you will, however, also need a font that supports the Unicode characters being used by that document. Windows NT typically includes support for all common single-byte writing-systems in its Arial, Times, and Courier New fonts and will additionally include all required fonts for the writing-system in your own country (i.e. if you install the Japanese version of Windows NT you will automatically have fonts that support the Katakana, Hiragana, and Kanji writing-systems as well as the input-methods and dictionaries to enter Kanji and to switch between Katakana and Hiragana). If you wish to edit any document from a foreign writing-system, you may want to install additional Windows NT components for that writing-system or purchase special Unicode fonts for these writing-systems (such fonts are available from all leading type vendors). Please note that most fonts only contain a very specific subset of the entire Unicode range and are therefore typically targeted at the corresponding writing system. Consequently you may encounter XML documents that contain "unprintable" characters, because the font you have selected does not contain the required glyphs. Therefore it can sometimes be very useful to have a font that covers the entire Unicode range - especially when editing XML documents from all over the world. The most universal font we have seen so far is a typeface called "Arial Unicode MS" that has been created by Agfa Monotype for Microsoft. This font contains over 50.000 glyphs and covers the entire set of characters specified by the Unicode 2.1 standard. It measures about 23MB and is included with Microsoft Office 2000 and we can highly recommend that you install this font on your system and use it with XML Spy, if you are often editing documents in different writing systems. This font is not installed with the "typical" setting of the Microsoft Office setup program, but you can choose the custom setup to install this font. In the "Examples" folder you will also find a new XHTML file called "Unicode-UTF8.xml" that contains the sentence "When the world wants to talk, it speaks Unicode" in many different languages ("Wenn die Welt miteinander spricht, spricht sie Unicode") and writing-systems ("  Unicode  ") - this line has been adopted from the 10th Unicode conference in 1997 and is a beautiful illustration of the importance of Unicode for the XML standard. Opening this file will give you a quick impression on what is possible with Unicode and what writing systems are supported by the fonts available on your PC installation.
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