Hi, I want to create an application like character map, for only specific characters, and extra features. There is quite a large problem in doing this though. I want to have controls whos captions have these special characters. However when I am creating this using my IDE, Pasting these characters into the code just put a "?", since the edit box in the IDE does not support all of these extra characters. I cant exactly use a RTF editor since when the file is saved it saves with it all of the formatting chars etc. I need to be able to use a plain text editor that supports these characters, any ideas?

The problem you see is due the the font the editor uses. Look around the editor's menu and see if it allows you to change the font, then find a font that supports the characters you want to use.

I have tried switching the font on notepad to Microsoft Sans Serif using the special characters. The characters where displayed correctly, but when i saved the file, it prompted me to save the file with unicode encoding to support these characters. In doing this i tried to compile the file and i recieved lots of errors like ... "C:\file.cpp:182:1: warning: null character(s) ignored"

Saving with ANSI encoding does not support these characters, and unicode generates lots of errors.

actually, there are warnings like that for every single line, but before all the warnings appear errors like this appear... "error: stray '\203' in program" etc.

you probably need to compile your program to support UNICODE. You can't treat a unicode-written file as if it were an ascii file becuase it is not the same file format. UNICODE characters are two or more bytes per character.so you need to use char data type with wchar_t and use unicode replacements for string handling functions. c++ std::wstring instead of std::string.