note ariels This code <em>may</em> work, but not reliably -- it depends on your background colour. For comparison, <blockquote> <table><tr><td bgcolor="pink"><code>y -_- -</code></td></tr></table> </blockquote> will <em>never</em> work (on most browsers), as it will tend to generate pinkspace. Of course, <a href="http://unicode.org/">Unicode</a> probably has 4 different solutions for you (although 2 will not work for Japanese and the other 2 fail for Arabic). Perl supports Unicode, so you should have no problems in that regard. <p> I suspect, however, that this is an inherent problem; Perl cannot help you here. 174133 174156