andrew said:

Well, everyone is entitled to their own opinions. My own opinion is still that the way microsoft introduced and have used their character sets has created unnecessary difficulty for many people.

that's funny, because i have the same opinion about the way the unicode process has gone... but at some point, we need to just let it all go.

I'm sorry if you perceive that as making an excuse.

well, yeah, if you're blaming microsoft (on something that they did a few decades back) for a mistake that was made much later, yeah, then i "perceive" that as making an excuse, yes. moreover, i "perceive" it as laughably abysmal... why not just say, "oh, hey, the encoding was wrong", fix it, and move on? why the need to point a finger? then -- as indicated in my previous message -- i would go on to _improve_the_workflow_ so that such problems wouldn't crop up again in the future. so you either make your converter impervious to the incorrect encoding declarations in the library, or you scrub the library to remove the incorrect declarations. i would probably do both, just to be on the safe side... what i would _not_ do is point 30 years into the past to try to deflect responsibility from where it belongs. -bowerbird