Why does CEdit control not display special characters e.g., ™ (Trademark)? For example, create a CDialog with a CEdit control and set the Dialog title and CEdit control to the same CString and get different results.

CString  s(_T("ShowTM ™"));
SetWindowText(s);           //Set Dialog Title (shows ™)
editCtrl.SetWindowText(s);  //Set Edit Control (does not show ™)

Thanks Christian and Paul. With your help I was able to piece together what was going on. The conclusion may be flawed but Visual Studio use to create dialogs with a default font property of

FONT 8, "MS Sans Serif"

MS Sans Serif is only really used by Windows Me/95/98 and is missing the characters I needed.

Today the default font is

FONT 8, "MS Shell Dlg"

MS Shell Dlg is not really a font as much as a placeholder Windows maps on to a real font later, depending on the version of Windows. Windows XP/Vista/7 etc map to Microsoft (not MS) Sans Serif which has the characters I needed.

I believe Windows was dynamically mapping MS Sans Serif to Microsoft Sans Serif for CDialog, but not CEdit, and

editCtrl.SetWindowTextW( _T("Hello ™"));

worked because new dialogs use MS Shell Dlg font and therefore get the full character set of Microsoft Sans Serif.

Given this is legacy code I have just under 200 explicit MS San Serif references that should be update to MS Shell Dlg. Yay!

For more detail on the font mapping see https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/dd374112%28v=vs.85%29.aspx.