When is Unicode not Unicode?

[Graham Samuel]

I have been trying to substitute Unicode characters in some text which contains some mathematical notation originated on a Mac (where several symbols like 'pi', 'less than or equals' etc are available as standard) so as to make the text look OK on a PC. Not to bore people with a lot of experimental data, but I find that a regular font on the PC (the default one that LiveCode chooses for example) doesn't seem to contain symbols like pi which I imagined could be shown using the LC Unicode operations.

I see that I don't understand how to get consistent text across the two platforms: is it a font problem, or something else? I would really like to understand it but so far I have not found a good place related to LiveCode's use of Unicode where this is all explained.

Can anyone point me to the right place?

TIA

Graham

PS I know from Jacque Gay that i could approach this another way using HTML, but I would really like to understand the Unicode thing before giving up.