Unicode

Personal computers originally only support a small set of human-readable characters. These were part of a set of 128 characters, among which the basic alphabet in lower and upper case, numbers 0 through 9, some punctuation marks, and some control characters.

An additional 128 characters became available that have throughout the world been used for small localised character sets. StageRace 2003 already supported a number of these character sets (iso-8859, Windows-125x and Windows-874).

Unicode is a much more recently established set that consists of many thousands of characters, supporting all locally used characters at once, and is typically two-bytes per character. As per the 2005 version StageRace fully supports Unicode. This means that the data you input to StageRace can be any Unicode character and all output is Unicode.

You can select in the HTML settings if full documents must be in Unicode or that only non-ANSI characters must be encoded in the HTML. Only events that typically have many non-ASCII characters (e.g. in their MultiLanguage database or in their competitors and teams lists) should use full Unicode documents. Because of the two-byte nature of Unicode, full Unicode documents are typically around double the size.

A few exceptions on Unicode support exist:

• The e-mail body of e-mails sent through the Event items selection dialog will be encoded in non-Unicode; and
• The language identifiers for multi-language strings can only exist of characters ranging A-Z and 0-9.