Hutch & Tim,
Thanks for your suggestions, I appreciate your interest, really :t
There is one minor problem, though: It works already. Study the examples above, they work absolutely fine and assemble in ML 6.15... no need for more acrobacy ;-)
Under the hood: RichMasm's RichEd20.dll control has always (since 200x?) used Unicode by default. All I had to do is find a way to export UTF-8 text to plain text, and start the build. Actually, the process is a little bit more complicated, but the principle is that simple. And those who believe in purest assembler without any macros can use even ML version 6.14 to process their szText "歡迎", 0 8)