My interpretation of the "Do you know which font is suitable for Unicode?"
question was Do you know which font can cover all the Unicode ranges?"
not "Do you know a Unicode font?"
I could have ask for more clarification and waste another day,
or restate the question as I understand it, which I did
("There is no font covering all the Unicode ranges.") and answer.
If I got the question wrong, Kevin can ask again.
But the answer to the question (as I understand it) is correct.
That's probably true with Asian languages. However, there are clearly
non-Unicode fonts that contain 256 characters at best, and there are
Unicode ones, covering all the Central and Eastern European languages,
Russian, Greek, etc.
....
Typically most of the Microsoft-provided TrueType fonts that come with
the OS are Unicode. That's Arial, Courier New, Tahoma, Times New Roman
at the minimum.
What makes a font unicode is not support for more than one script, or more
than 256 characters, but the presence of one of the Unicode cmap table
formats (see
http://www.microsoft.com/typography/otspec/cmap.htm)
The US and European Windows don't have the Asian package installed by
default, but you can always choose to install it later. Many of the
fonts I have will never show Japanese characters, but the built-in
Microsoft fonts will do, after installing the Asian package.
Some of the MS fonts show Japanese after installing Asian support
not because the MS fonts are smarter, or Unicode, but because adding Asian
support also adds the proper font linking entries in the registry.
It can be done with your fonts too, if you are not afraid to play
with the registry (see HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows
NT\CurrentVersion\FontLink\SystemLink)
--
Mihai Nita [Microsoft MVP, Windows - SDK]
http://www.mihai-nita.net
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