The standards body that created ASCII only standardized the first 128 characters. These lower 128 are rock-solid and supported just about everywhere, espcially for English speak countries.
The other 128 (also known as the high ASCII characters) are mapped in using
code pages. These code pages are the ones that contain the fancy characters. Obviously, not every country or corporation or person considers the same 128 characters to be of the same importance (possibly not even the same order).
Depending on how you are outputing the characters (say NetBeans console versus the windows console) will change whether you characters will print correctly or will be converted to unknowns. The last time I tried to do this, I had the most success with running the app in the windows console window, unfortunately the ones that are in editors are generally very simple.
Hope this helps.
