A table storing a character set supporting one or more language scripts. Many personal computers use operating systems that support multiple code pages and allow you to switch between them.

When you press a key on a keyboard (a letter, symbol, or number), the computer receives a numeric code that represents that keystroke. Code pages store these numeric codes.

In a single-byte code page, up to 256 codes are available to represent lower and upper case letters, numbers, punctuation marks, and all the mathematical symbols on your keyboard.

However, 256 codes are not sufficient to represent all the letters and characters used in every language. Some Roman character-based languages, for instance, have a larger alphabet than others and include many accented characters.

For example, a common code page (known as 437) can be used for several Roman character-based languages, including English, French, and German. Portuguese, however, requires a different character set. Code page 860 (Portuguese) removes the symbol for f (franc) and inserts an (O acute).

Other languages such as Chinese, Japanese, and Korean use different characters altogether. The character sets for these languages contain thousands of characters and require a double-byte code page.

The differences between any two single-byte code pages may cause display and readability problems. Differences between single-byte and double-byte code pages usually cause display and readability problems.

Two steps have been taken to help resolve these problems:

• A common code page (850) has been established that handles most character sets of the Roman script.

  This set doesn't include some line drawing characters, and other characters appear in a new location within the table.

• A new convention, called Unicode*, that supports 64,000 characters has been established.

  Unicode provides enough codes to support Roman, Chinese, and other character bases.

Nonetheless, whether you use a common code page or Unicode, any unrecognizable character is substituted in your display. Unrecognizable characters in DOS are displayed as a heart, and in MS Windows as a box.

Substituted characters can prevent NDS from recognizing an object. For example, you create an Organizational Unit object to represent Finance in western Europe and use code page 852 to make the generic currency symbol a part of its name (OU=[curren]W-Euro).

When this object is accessed using code page 437, the unsupported currency symbol ([curren]) is replaced and a new name is sent to NDS. NDS, however, doesn't recognize the new name, and the object can't be opened or accessed---a potentially serious problem.

The only solution is to determine which code page was used to create the object, then view the object using that code page. Determining which code page was used can be time consuming.