ANSI vs Unicode, traditional ANSI  text files store each character as a single 
byte, 8 bits.  Unicode  uses two bytes (16 bits)  per character. This allows support 
for complex character sets like some foreign alphabets, but creates a programming 
problem. There is no simple way to determine whether a character is stored in one 
byte or two, and searching Unicode text is complicated.

Given the encoding scheme's name, ANSI - American National Standards Institute, 
it's no surprise that most  of the symbols it defines are part of the English 
language. plus common punctuation marks, some math symbols such as plus and minus, 
and U.S. currency symbols for dollars and cents  - making total of 223 symbols. 
On the other hand, Unicode  having over 65,000 different symbols allows for many 
if not all foreign letters and diacritic characters.

Over the last few years Unicode has quietly been replacing ANSI as the encoding 
method of choice inside our PCs.  But  application programs have been slower to 
adopt Unicode because searching Unicode text is complicated.  Sorry to say,  it 
will take 2-4 years for this journal to switch all its operation from ANSI to Unicode.