I also encourage the use of UTF-8, [since] it allows the encoding of the Unicode character set. 7 bit ASCII characters are encoded as 8 bit characters with the most significant bit zero.
I use UTF-8 in several products and then decode to 16 bit Unicode. The
16 bit Unicode then indexes into a bitmap table of Unifont characters for display. The characters I'm currently using are shown at
formatting link
.Harold