Sorry about that :). OS: SuSE Linux; character: anything beyond the standers ISO charset; message: Character x is too wide; What do I think wrote the message: I have it narrowed down to either the Perl Interpreter or I do not have my computer comfigured properly and the shell is giving me the message; component to reinstall: unicode. I was hoping that by posting my message I could get some advice as to whether I'm writing my code incorrectly, or I have not configured my computer to work with unicode properly. I am in a situation where I need to write a script that uses characters that are not within the standard charset, and I assumed that, for my purposes, using unicode would be slightly more efficient that downloading a font with those characters and switching between the two :). Thanks for your help :), sorry I didn't have enough info :).