Re: International Font to be Used

From: Christopher John Fynn (cfynn@gmx.net)
Date: Mon Jun 09 2003 - 14:02:59 EDT

  • Next message: Noah Levitt: "Re: International Font to be Used"

     "Abdij Bhat" <Abdij.Bhat@kshema.com> wrote:

    > Hi,
    > I want one font to be used across all languages. Is it
    possible? For
    > example, I want Tahoma to be used for all languages for all
    OS.
    > Does Tahoma support this?

    It may be possible but it doesn't sound like a good idea - a
    font with proper support for all the modern scripts in the
    Unicode Standard would be *huge* - especially if it included
    variant CJK glyphs for both Japanese and Chinese and proper
    support for complex scripts (including Indic scripts and
    Arabic).

    Some Operating systems may not have support for complex script
    layout.

    Tahoma is a proprietory Microsoft font and unless you have a
    copy of Windows installed on the same machine it may not be
    legal to use it on another OS. Anyway Tahoma has support for
    Latin, Cyrillic, Greek, Hebrew, Arabic and Thai - but not other
    scripts.

    I think you are much better off to have different fonts for
    different Unicode ranges - While it makes some sense to put
    glyphs for several reasonably small scripts together in a single
    font, scripts, with a large glyph repertoire or scripts that
    have complex layout rules are better handled with separate
    fonts. Some languages which use different variants of the same
    script (e.g. Chinese & Japanese or Arabic & Urdu) may also need
    separate fonts for the same Unicode range.

    - Chris

    cfynn@gmx.net



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