From: John H. Jenkins (jenkins@apple.com)
Date: Mon Dec 06 2004 - 19:07:08 CST
On Dec 6, 2004, at 10:23 AM, Johannes Bergerhausen wrote:
> From some discussions here i learned that Arial Unicode MS contains
> about 50.000 glyphs,
> which is about the size of characters encoded in Unicode 2.0 and was
> shipped the last
> time bundled with Office for Windows 2003.
>
> A Pan-Unicode-Font is a beautiful idea.
>
> Why Microsoft/Monotype stopped the developpement of further versions?
>
The TrueType and OpenType font formats do not allow a font to contain
more than about 65,000 glyphs. Since there are well over 65,000
characters in Unicode, plus additional glyphic forms that would be
necessary for proper support for various scripts, it is no longer
possible to produce a single font like Arial Unicode MS.
There are other issues -- making a single typeface which covers all the
scripts in Unicode and has a common esthetic design is really not
possible; loading a huge font can consume a significant chunk of the
resources on a system, most of which is wasted; and so on.
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