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

Sample:

global_settings { charset utf8 }
text{
   ttf "arial.ttf",
   concat(
   chr(196),chr(203),chr(214),chr(220),
   " ",chr(8364)) 0.01, 0
   texture{
     pigment{color rgb<1,0.65,0>}
     finish{ambient 0.1 diffuse 0.8}
          }
   ... etc. ...  }

Scene file for POV-Ray

Unicode with Asiatic characters

To render Asistic and Arabic characters, if we don't live right in these regions, we need to have unicode fonts installed, i.e.:
ttf "MSMINCHO.TTF"
(see upper line)
ttf "SIMSUN.TTF"
ttf "BATANG.TTF"
ttf "ARIALUNI.TTF"
(see lower line)
(far easter language support of Microsoft!)

Asiatic Characters in POV-Ray