Creo Elements/Direct Drafting’s different internal and external encoding schemes were Unicode incorporated for version 2007. Unicode allows text and symbols from all languages to be consistently represented and manipulated by computers.

All textual and string data processed by Creo Elements/Direct Drafting is held internally in Unicode (UTF-8) encoding. That means most of Creo Elements/Direct Drafting 's functionality processes user input from almost any language, and string data from different languages can be mixed. For example, it is now possible to have German, Japanese, and Russian characters within a single string, such as a part name.

Drafting's font list contains all the Creo Elements/Direct true type fonts that are dynamically converted to internal font format when referenced. An appropriate font that contains all desired characters must be selected to display texts and dimension texts correctly. Fonts containing characters from the whole Unicode range are relatively rare, and they usually contain the word Unicode in their name (for example, Arial Unicode MS).

Symbols are a special Creo Elements/Direct Drafting feature and display with hp_symbols and hp_symbols2 fonts. They can still be composed in old-style escape sequences (#15#XY#16) but for compatibility with Unicode are mapped to a private-use Unicode area [E000-E1FF]: