Jump to page content

Bug of the moment 2007-01-16


While thieving the Greek Unicode subrange for my Lightweight Unicode compose mock-up from Windows Character Map, I noticed something very strange. Take a look at one of the characters shown:

Pay attention to not only the glyph, but its code point. Now take a look at this other character:

Looks frightfully similar, eh? On closer inspection I realised that a whole swathe of characters from that sub-range are duplicated. Note that the duplication begins with a capital sigma which is well into the Greek alphabet.

I am a little worried that it has taken me so many years to spot this bug, although the possibility remains that the bug has freshly bred on my computer. I would be curious to see if Windows XP demonstrates the same bug, especially since it appears to have an identical version of Character Map complete with all the other, more obvious bugs.

To reproduce the bug:

  1. Open Character Map
  2. Make sure Advanced view is ticked
  3. Set Group by to “Unicode Subrange”
  4. From the Group By palette, scroll down to Greek and select it

I also spotted the Search for box today. If I have subrange grouping enabled, and search for “sigma”, the duplicates show up in the search, but they do not show up if I search with Group by left at the default of “All”.

It’s all Greek to me…


Update: betbest1 confirms the above Character Map bug in XP. Not just me :)


Posted 16th January 2007 – Comments and questions?