Display Unicode in a Windows console window with printf/wprintf

Did you know that you can print Unicode to a console window under Windows? I didn't. Here are some blog entries that discuss how to do it. You need Visual Studio 2005 or later to display Unicode using the C run-time library. Thanks to Microsoft C++ MVPs Jochen Kalmbach and Igor Tandetnik for introducing me to these solutions:

http://blog.kalmbachnet.de/?postid=98

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2010/10/07/10072032.aspx

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2008/03/18/8306597.aspx

http://illegalargumentexception.blogspot.com/2009/04/i18n-unicode-at-windows-command-prompt.html

With the techniques in those articles, you can display both UTF-16 and UTF-8 Unicode characters in a console window.

There are some caveats:

• The console window must be set to a TrueType font. By default it is set to a raster font, which does not support Unicode characters.
• Not all languages are supported. Lucida Console, the most common console TrueType font, will display Russian characters, but not Arabic or Hebrew.

This article discusses the issues with Hebrew characters and provides some workarounds:
http://groups.google.com/group/microsoft.public.win32.programmer.international/browse_thread/thread/788eaf7082088b35