"Universal" font

well, okay, according to all the problem Arial seems to provok : incorrect handle of the asian characters (even if from my point of view, it seemed to be okay), moreover the fact that the bold can not be displayed. We choose for the moment to keep the Lucida Grande, and only with latin and cyrillic alphabets. When I'll have to manage the asian characters, I think I'll choose one for japan and chinese alphabets, and one for korean.

Many thanks for your help that permits me seeing more clearly in typography !

Just to be absolutely clear, you'll need a separate font for EACH of: Japanese, Korean, Simplified Chinese (mainland China) and Traditional Chinese (Taiwan and many expatriate communities).

Cheers,

T

When you come to that point, may I mention the book "CJKV Information
Processing", just in case you don't have it. At around 1000 pages it
isn't lightweight but it does contain a lot of information to explain
the special needs of working with Far Eastern fonts.

Aandi Inston

Hi,

Sorry to answer so lately, I'm just coming back home.

The closer you can get to a universal font is the DejaVu font project. DejaVu font family is an OpenType (and open source) flavour of the Bitstream Vera fonts. The aim of the project is to improve typographic quality and language coverage. It actually supports a wide portion of the Unicode Latin blocs, and many more. Arabic is partially covered as for Hebrew and many supplements. Few Chinese characters are included for now and there's no Japanese. CJK is on the roadmap.

The project site: <http://dejavu.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Main_Page>
and, for the language coverage: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DejaVu_fonts>

Benoît Favreault

sorry but the arial unicode Msis the only font I managed to embedded in Flash that permits displaying all the characters.. otherwise I still have square on my korean alphabet :/

Some foundries do not permit their fonts to be embedded.

Neil

Just to corect my original post, it turns out that Arial Unicode MS does have the multiple forms needed to support both Chinese and Japanese. However, you'd need to be working with an app that supports the 'locl' OpenType feature.

In another comment: The closer you can get to a universal font is the DejaVu font project.

There are a number of other fonts with vastly greater Unicode coverage than DejaVu. As noted, it is missing Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. As the original poster was specifically looking for Chinese and Japanese, it is not a reasonable recommendation.

That being said, for Latin and Latin-related writing systems, the DejaVu fonts have pretty good coverage.

Cheers,

T

Thanks for your message. In fact I choose Lucida Grande for every alphabet except the Asian ones. I've choosen Osaka for the japanese font, and I'm actually looking for a good chinese alphabet for TAIWANESE font (If people know some on mac/flash).
By the way I notice that those asian fonts usually don't handle the bold !!! (or such slicely that it's barely visible...) Do somebody know a way to do it ?

>By the way I notice that those asian fonts usually don't handle the bold !!!

You mean you are using fake-bold, and it isn't working well? Avoid
fake bold at all costs, this is considered the enemy of good
typography. Select a font designed in bold, and switch to use it
whenever bold is needed.nSimilarly italics.

Aandi Inston

Hi Andi, thanks for the answer, thing is that I don't know how to do it using css in flex... For the moment, I'm declaring a font to use, and I embedded this font into normal, bold and italic. But if I use another font in the bold declaration for instance, then it takes the non embedded font first declared (font-family = "Lucida Grande")