OpenType Features of Arial Unicode MS
Joshua Hadley - Agfa Monotype Corporation
| Intended Audience: |
Software Engineers, Content Developers, Font Designers, Graphic Designers |
| Session Level: |
Intermediate |
As the first publicly available OpenType font to contain glyph coverage
for all defined characters of The Unicode Standard (Version 2.1), Arial
Unicode has generated a great deal of interest, particularly within the
multilingual community.
Because of its large size, many people assume that Arial Unicode MS is a
"just" a large font with a one-glyph-to-character mapping throughout.
Created for inclusion with Microsoft's Office product, it actually contains
over 50,000 glyphs (by comparison, Version 2.1 of The Unicode Standard
defines about 39,000 non-private characters). Using OpenType technology, Arial
Unicode MS includes features for extended script and language support, such as
localized CJK writing style differentiation ("Unihan disambiguation"), Arabic
contextual forms, and extensive re-arrangement and substitution features for
various Indic scripts. This presentation will highlight some of the OpenType
features in Arial Unicode MS, as well as some basic concepts of OpenType and
font issues in general.
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