[PD] japanese encoded chars in PD

[august]

> august wrote:
> > 
> > hey'aw.
> > 
> > Can anyone give me hand on handling Japanese character encodings in PD.
> > 
> > I feel like I've read every document on character encodings and still
> > don't understand the mess....even for my own pragrams that work with
> > text.
> > 
> > Is there a way to handle UTF-8  in PD?
> 
> hmm, depends on what you mean by "handling characters".
> 
> at least in Gem, you should be able to display unicode characters, by
> using the [string( message (in combination with [text3d]).
> the arguments are numbers which enumerate the glyphs in your font (and
> with unicode fonts this should map to unicode characters:)
> report a bug if it does not.
> 
> however, you might be talking of something totally different...
> 


that is one part I was looking for.  thank you.

are there also objects for handling conversions between character
encodings?   Or, an object to convert between utf8 or UCS-2 and the unicode
char code numbers that GEM takes?


Is there a default character encoding for PD messages? I assume it is
LATIN1 because I have seen umlauts in comments before(I think).   It
doesn't look like I can make comments in UTF8 encoded chars.

I have my char problems solved right now, but now as I discover more
about the difficulties of character encodings and the treachery that
ASCII has caused....I am just curious.