"Universal" font

You mean Asian, not "Asiatic".

<http://www.tfd.com/asiatic>

You'll need multiple fonts for East Asian languages. Specifically, separate fonts for each of simplified and traditional Chinese, Japanese, and Korean.

As I wrote just the other day on Typophile, the particularly thorny problem is dealing with the Han unification characters. Basically, for certain East Asian characters, There are slightly (or sometimes very) different designs for certain characters for all these different languages. Currently, the only functional way to distinguish them is to build an OpenType font with the ’locl’ (locale) feature, and use apps/OSes that process that feature correctly for those languages.

I’m not sure how widespread such app/OS support is for the ’locl’ feature with those languages, outside of InDesign CS3, but I know that such fonts are pretty much non-existent in the wild. AFAIK, thus far such fonts have only been built by mad scientists in labs (pace Adobe's own Dr Lunde & Mr Meyer).

Because of the potential for great efficiency (space savings), I imagine we will see such fonts in the wild in the future.

Cheers,

T

> the particularly thorny problem is dealing with the Han unification characters.

I read about that in CJKV Information Processing. It has long seemed
to me that this has killed the idea of a universal Unicode font.
However... do you happen to know what Arial Unicode did with these
code points? Did it pick one regional variant and hope it would do?


Aandi Inston

AFAIK Arial Unicode MS uses Chinese glyph styles. It also reports itself as being a Chinese font to certain applications on Windows (not sure where I saw that).

- Michael

I believe Michael is correct. Whichever forms they picked, they did pick one set. So like any other font currently available, Arial Unicode isn't good for more than one of [Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Japanese, Korean].

Cheers,

T

Hello everybody !
Well, in fact, I managed to do what I wanted using Arial Unicode MS. And it can display correctly all the languages supported by the application (latin, japanese, chinese, korean, polish, cyrillic alphabets) so I believe it was the "universal font" I was looking for. Awesome ! Thanks a lot for your help !!!!

Gaelle,

do you have bold or italic text in your documents?

Make a print of Polish or Cyrillic text with and without bold and/or italic formatting and compare them with standard Arial with bold/italic.

You will see the quality difference.

Also: If you still want to go that way, be warned that different printers handle electronic bold-ing and oblique-ing differently. Up to the point of ignoring it.

In my opinion: A bad decision with many drawbacks.

- Michael

Pfff ..
Yeah I just tryed what you asked me, the italic is correctly displayed, but for the bold I have a problem.. In fact, the difference between a bold and a non bold is quite invisible. I'm going to do more work on this.. Maybe another font can handle the bold ?

Arial Unicode is one font in one weight. While Arial is four fonts.

And are you not concerned about the Han character issue, which means
it is not really suitable for Japanese, Korean, one Chinese, as
discussed above?

Aandi Inston

And it can display correctly all the languages supported by the application
(latin, japanese, chinese, korean... <




No, it cannot. See my posts above.

T