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My advice: NEVER use Unicode characters in file names and paths and NEVER create directory structures where the name+extension+path is longer than 259 ANSI characters.

Unicode characters are only supported by NTFS, but not by FAT, FAT32 or some CD-ROM formats. And most programs also not support Unicode names of files/directories. So if you want compatibility with most of the world, don't use Unicode characters in file/directory names.

See also the NTFS vs FAT comparison sheet.

I'm not an expert of MS deep secrets of it's file systems. Maybe you are right and FAT32 now in V1.03 also supports Unicode file names as explained in the DOC file Microsoft Extensible Firmware Initiative FAT32 File System Specification.

However, I think UltraEdit supports Unicode file names too. I found following line in readme.txt for v11.10a.

- Multibyte filenames(Korean) can now be opened from Project tree view.

For a definitive answer on this question you have to ask IDM support by email. Please post the answer also here. I would be also interested in, if UltraEdit supports it or not, although I will have never a file on my disks with a Unicode file name.

Have you tried it with both settings of the option Check short names against files already loaded to prevent loading of two copies of same file at Configuration - File Handling - Advanced?

You can also use Filemon to look what's going on on your harddisk when UltraEdit tries to open the file with the Unicode characters. That's what I always do when access to files fails and I want to know why.

takarada wrote:Notepad solved this problem about 10 years ago. As I pointed out to their tech support all they need to do is switch to a Unicode file open dialog and there would be no problem.

Notepad can't be used as reference here because with Notepad you can just open a text file, edit it, print content and save it and nothing more.

And it is much more complicated then just using the Unicode version of the file open dialog. You have to think about all situations where the name of the file is used in UltraEdit: document array for scripts and other scripting commands; IfNameIs, IfExtIs, CopyFilePath in macros; File Names = and File Extensions = in wordfiles; file names in the output window, in the title bar, in the file tree view, find / replaces in files, projects, workspaces, FTP, Telnet, and so on. All type of configuration files (INI, PRJ, wordfiles, etc.) which are currently only in ASCII/ANSI must be changed to Unicode (for best downwards compatibility UTF-8) to support storing Unicode file names (histories, tools, project files, etc.). While ASCII/ANSI file names are limited in length to 259 characters, the limit for Unicode file names is 32767 characters. Have you ever seen a file not found error message or a file list when the full path of a file is really long, for example 1000+ characters. Many, many things must be changed to get full Unicode support for file names.

The author of my favorite file manager Total Commander spent 1 year with more than 6 months public beta testing to get TC 99.5% Unicode file name compatible.

The big advantage the IDM developers would have in comparison to the author of Total Commander: UltraEdit is only compatible with Win2K and later while TC is compatible with Win95 and any later version of Windows. I'm a programmer which has developed a Windows program which is compatible from Windows 98 to Windows 7 without Unicode support and with using very limited Windows functions and therefore know how much work it is to get a Windows application working on all versions of Windows without limitations, especially when the application has a history and is not written completely new. In my point of view the author of Total Commander is really a genius.

A workaround, which TC used before v7.50 was released with full Unicode file name support, is to open files with Unicode characters with 8.3 short name when it is possible to get the short file name of a file with a Unicode character in path/name. But users often do not like it when they see their files with "encrypted" name in an application because the application used the 8.3 format of the file name.