National Character Sets and Unicode

The character set normally installed ("fonts") have much more characters and signs than the normal ASCII set. We can use all installed character sets. Problems occure with national characters because POV-Ray by default know only to handle the basic ASCII set.
To enable POV-Ray to use also national characters in text objects, we use the command:
global_settings { charset utf8 }

Unicode text objects
with national character sets

global_settings { charset utf8 }
text{
  ttf "arial.ttf",
  concat(
  chr(196),chr(203),chr(214),chr(220),
  " ",chr(8364)), 0.01, 0
  pigment{color rgb<0.5,0,0>}
  scale 0.4 translate<-0.5,0.5,0> }

global_settings { charset utf8 }
text{
  ttf "arial.ttf",
  "\u00C4\u00CB\u00D6\u00DC \u20AC",
  0.01, 0
  pigment{color rgb<0.5,0,0>}
  scale 0.4 translate<-0.5,0.5,0> }   

Scene file for POV-Ray:
unicode_west.txt or unicode_west.pov

A part of the Unicode (western europe characters)