kuri wrote:
> Maybe a much more expensive pro version of XP. Not the ordinary Home Edition
> and last time I asked the pro edition they were selling in Softmap had not
> the "old Japanese characters" in it.

I need to check exactly how I did it, but when I checked initially my
new French Windows XP Home, computer bundled edition, I was deeply
frustrated not to have Arial Unicode and not even any japanese able font.
But then I saw that some asiatic fonts were supposed to be on Windows
XP, and I just don't remember what you need to do exactly but there's a
huge pack of additional fonts hidden on the install CD.

Now I still don't have Arial Unicode, but I've got Batang BatangChe
Dotum DotumChe Gulim GulimChe Gungsuh GungsuhChe MingLiu SimHei SimSun,
they all have a lot more chinese characters than MS Mincho/MS Gothic
that got installed too. SimHei/SimHun even have a few (around 50 out of
6000) of the CJK Extension A characters which are completely missing
from Arial Unicode. Still not one of those has occidental characters
that are convincing for everyday use, so it makes them not that great to
use as a default font, and getting Arial Unicode is better for that.

There's also arabic, tamoul, devanagari, thana, bengali, etc. fonts

Talking about CJK Extension A remebered me that's a freely downloadable
font that includes all chinese characters up to that (only Extension B
is missing), it's SimSun-18030. There's a .msi that's free download from
Microsoft with SimSun-18030 for Win2000+, and there's the .TTF available
for Linux users.

I've found a page with the list of those additional font and some
indication about how to do to install them :
http://mlang1.osaka-gaidai.ac.jp/~tagengo/multi/win_font_list.html

    *  無印 = Windows XP 標準インストールのフォント

    * [複合] = Windows XP 「補足言語サポート」 の
「複合文字や右から左方向に書く言語」 のインストールで追加されるフォント