mixed languages in a field? HTMLText problems

[Curtis Ford]

As a newbie I'm getting gray hairs trying to build a scrolling text 
field that will display both English and Russian. (The code already 
works well for English & other languages in the Latin alphabet, 
including accents, umlauts, etc.). Simplifying a little, I have:

repeat with i = 1 to gHowManyItems

	[some code to get the first item]
	put [first item] after gWordList
	[more code for 2nd item]
	put tab & [2nd item] after gWordList
	[some code to get the 3rd item]
	put return & [3rd item] after gWordList
	[some code to get the 4th item]
	put tab & [4th item] after gWordList

end repeat

set the HTMLText of field "list field" to gWordList


When the first item is in Russian it shows up fine, but the following 
English word displays as Chinese characters.

When experimenting, I tried adding
   put "test some English at beginning" && return before gWordList
   put return & "test some English at end" after gWordList

..after building the list but before setting the HTMLText of the field.

The English text added before gWordList displayed fine; the Russian 
elements in gWordList  displayed fine; but the English text added after 
gWordList was gibberish. It seems that once an element in Russian has 
been added, it doesn't want to go back to an encoding that works with 
English - ?

I've been able to copy mixed-language text from one field to another 
when I'd entered the text in Revolution (using HTMLText), but when I 
try to create something that fills fields dynamically from variables, I 
can't get it to work right.

Is there something that prevents mixing languages in a field? Am I 
missing something obvious? Are there any sample files out there that 
demonstrate using different languages in a field using HTMLText?

Thanks for any suggestions!

-Curt

Dr. Curtis Ford
Instructor of Russian and Linguistics
Dept. of Language, Literatures and Cultures
University of South Carolina
cford @ sc.edu