On the Xbox.com site we have some Flash widgets that pull data from XML. These widgets will eventually get used by all the Xbox sites around the world which means they need to be Unicode friendly.

So here’s the basics of what we did to get this to work.

1. You need to save your text files as UTF-8, or Unicode. That doesn’t mean the extension changes. They still have the same content. In NotePad, the encoding option is below the filetype and it defaults to ANSII. So change that.
2. The text fields in Flash should use a devise font, such as _sans.

That’s pretty much it. Now you can put Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, hell, even Sanskrit works, provided the user has a Sanstrit font.

Here are some useful links:

UTF-8 Sampler: “I can eat glass and it doesn’t hurt me” translated into 132 different languages. This is a great place to get a sample of different characters to copy into your XML to see how it works with different character sets.

Unicode Wiki: The Unicode page at Wikipedia.org.
Unicode Resources: the resources page at the Unicode.org website.

HTML 4.0 – Unicode instead of ISO 8859-1: ISO 8859 is a set of 10 different 256-character sets used to represent a large set of the alphabetic languages used in the West. It does not address Far East languages at all. These sets were designed by the standards group ECMA (European Computer Manufacturer’s Association,) and are included in the Internet charset register for use with MIME identification.

Unicode at Answers.com: A nice Unicode table