"Universal" font

Hello everybody !!!!

I'm looking for a font that can handles every type of characters, from the latin alphabet till the cyrillic alphabet via the asiatic alphabets (japanese, chinese, ..). I though that Lucida Grande would do it, but apparently not (when I embed this font on my appli, it doens't display correctly the characters..). With a japanese character I though that I would have manage to find it, but unfortunately the russian is craply displayed (with a huge letter-spacing)
So do you know if this magic font exist or how to find it ?

In other case, do you know how to find the character palette on the mac that would list me all the font available on my mac and which alphabet these fonts handle ?

Or maybe a website with fonts and their cover ?

Thanks a lot for any help !!!

CharViewer should be in your Application folder. It allows you to browse characters in installed fonts by language and category.

I don't think you'll be able to find a font that supports _every_ type of character, but Lucida Grande does support a lot. I don't know why the Cyrillic spacing is off, but I suspect you're not seeing the spacing built into the font. I just pasted some text from the Pravda site into Textedit and applied Lucida Grande to it, and it looked okay to me. (Mind you I don't know any Russian!)

What app are you using to set the type?

Gaelle,

For Japanese and Chinese, you need to use dedicated fonts, due to the number glyphs involved. But I believe these also include basic Roman characters as well.

Neil

I think the cyrillic characters in the Japanese fonts are meant for setting short word or phases within Japanese test, and spaced to work within that context.

I think you'll probably need to switch fonts, and that you should probably ask for advice in the Flash forums, or the Flex forums.

of course the japonese characters don't work here that why precedently my font name is really crappy !
Anyway, I forgot to tell you that I don't have any CharViewer on my mac, I'll try find a free download on internet !

Okay, since there were some other answers !

Thanks a lot for your "lights" yeah, it appears that I'll have to make more code to handle my problem..

Your can access the character palette from the input menu in system prefs.

Search on: "Finding characters for different languages on your keyboard" in the Mac help system.

Hey !!! Yep Ifound this part, but in fact, that was not what I was expected.. When I said "character palette" I was thinking something where you can see which alphabets each fonts is managing. But I still haven't found it..

Many folks wanted to have a single font for all purposes and "Arial Unicode MS" is the one many people use. But it is basically a bad idea, not only because this font has no bold or italic variants, it also has no kerning pairs. The result are ugly documents with bolded and obliqued characters.

Unicode is a standard that assigns a number to each character, but does not take into account differing typographic traditions. Please read the answer to question 3 "Does the unified Han encoding..." at this page:

<http://unicode.org/faq/han_cjk.html>

I would say you better look for a font that contains all Latin/Cyrillic/Greek glyphs, and a specialized font for Chinese, Japanese and Korean. This approach will give you far greater quality.

Thanks for the answer.. Indeed, that's what I will do I think it's the best solution, use one for all the font except asiatic, then manage the asiatic alphabets with another font !