Is there a Unicode-compatible alternative to PGN? One of the problems with PGN is that it requires ASCII, while names of players often contain non-ASCII characters. (And of course, many names are not written in the Latin alphabet ...) 

The background to this question is the rendering of non-ASCII characters in Arena 3.5.1 (on Windows 7), as in the image below. The names for white and black are Mittelsträß, Jürg and 王, 玥, respectively. Arena reads the UTF-8-encoded file as if it were encoded as Windows Codepage 1252. Editors such as Notepad++, SublimeText and JEdit identify the file as UTF-8 (which is the default encoding of all my plain text files, anyway). 



Here's an example PGN for testing:

[Event "Office Armageddon"]
[Site "Böblingen GER"]
[Date "??.??.??"]
[Round "?"]
[White "Mittelsträß, Jürg"]
[Black "王, 玥"]
[Result "*"]
[SetUp "1"]
[Mode "OTB"]
[Termination "unterminated"]

1. d2-d4 d7-d5 2. e2-e3 c7-c5 3. Bf1-b5+ Bc8-d7 4. a2-a4 Ng8-f6 5. d4xc5 e7-e5 6. b2-b4 Nb8-c6 7. Ng1-f3 Qd8-c7 8. Nb1-c3 a7-a6 9.  * 


(SCID assumes a system encoding if a PGN is encoded in UTF-8 without a byte order mark (BOM), but the BOM makes no difference in Areana 3.5.1.)

So I'd like to know if there is a Unicode-compatible alternative (ideally UTF-8) that is supported by some chess programs. (If not, PGN needs an overhaul.)
https://sourceforge.net/p/pgn4web/wiki/PGN_Support/

if you read that, you will notice:


 in order for pgn4web to display those characters correctly, the PGN file should be saved in unicode UTF-8 format.

you can save PGN as UTF-8... Just open notepad &gt; Save As... &gt; Encoding and select UTF-8. and you can then add the appropriate player names! I've tested this, and it works with Arena Chess and a few others...

Hope this solves your problem. ~CSS