John,
I find that the most compelling reason is that many characters should be
rendered differently depending on user preferences. For example a Japanese
user should have the han rendered into Japanese characters except for one
that do not exist in Japanese. These can be rendered with a Chinese font.
Likewise do you use Simplified or Traditional Chinese glyphs?
As you said font groupings are the best way to go for a "complete" font.
With a series for fonts grouped together so that if the characters is not on
the first fonts it selects from the second fonts, etc. is the way to go.
With Unicode extended planes and potentially millions of characters a single
font make no sense. Fonts like Microsoft's Unicode fonts which handle most
of the major scripts are potentially useful as a starting point. Beyond
that I think that we all agree that it is insane to try to produce a full
Unicode font.
Carl
-----Original Message-----
From: unicode-bounce@unicode.org [mailto:unicode-bounce@unicode.org]On
Behalf Of John Jenkins
Sent: Monday, May 21, 2001 6:41 PM
To: unicode@unicode.org
Subject: Re: Single Unicode Font
On Monday, May 21, 2001, at 03:38 PM, Tom Gewecke wrote:
> On 04/18/2001 09:49:40 AM John Jenkins wrote:
>
>> At the same time, none of the people involved in defining TrueType --
>> Adobe, Apple, and Microsoft -- believe that it is really a good idea to
>> have a single font covering all of Unicode. Microsoft provides one
>> because there has been a strong push from people demanding it, but it
>> still isn't a good idea.
>
> I'm curious what the disadvantages of such a font are, other than
> size. It
> seems like it would be rather useful in any setting where one might
> want to
> be able to read or use a large variety of languages with minimal admin
> effort, for example in a university or other public facility open to
> people
> of varied backgrounds and language needs.
There are two main objections.
One is simply size. Having a pan-Unicode font takes up a great deal of
system resources, and for most users there's no real benefit. (Just
think of all those ideographs on the system of someone who speaks
English only.) Depending on the system, it may actually be worse to
have a single font that covers everything (and is always being used)
than to have a number of smaller fonts (most of which go unused most of
the time).
Single monolithic fonts are also inherently more difficult to produce,
because existing type design tools don't handle collections of tens of
thousands of glyphs as readily as they do a couple of hundred glyphs.
Even existing tools for CJK aren't really designed for something as big
as a single pan-Unicode font. The QA and development work involved in a
single really big font file is probably more than the QA and development
work on a suite of smaller fonts.
Secondly, there are esthetic objections to the idea that a single type
design can encompass all of the varied scripts of Unicode. Most people
would probably balk at that as an objection, but it is a big deal for
type designers.
Mind, I personally like having pan-Unicode fonts and realize that other
people like or need them, too. But it really is silly IMHO to ask for
them to be a standard part of an installed system.
=====
John H. Jenkins
jenkins@apple.com
jenkins@mac.com
http://homepage.mac.com/jenkins/
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