Jonnie asked the following question on twitter: Does anyone know if there’s a single font that would allow all international characters? (Chinese, Hebrew, Korean, Cyrillic) And now I am curious to know, is there? Anyone?
Jonnie asked the following question on twitter: Does anyone know if there’s a single font that would allow all international characters? (Chinese, Hebrew, Korean, Cyrillic) And now I am curious to know, is there? Anyone?
As far as I know, there is not one font that includes all international characters. It would be possible, I think, because Unicode allows all characters to be compounded into one actual file. But I don’t think anyone has ever done that.
It might be something typeface design is headed towards. Since nowadays there are a few designers out there that base new Arabic typefaces on already existing (or designed at the same time) typefaces. Difficult process, I think, since Arabic and Latin are so vastly different. Good question, once again. :-)
Jan 5th, 2009 / 2:58 pm
If there is, I certainly hope it’s called Babel.
Jan 5th, 2009 / 3:45 pm
There’s (of course) Arial Unicode. I don’t know if this suits your needs, but it might be a suggestion.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arial_Unicode_MS
Jan 5th, 2009 / 4:16 pm
What about comic Sans?
NoRrrrrlly — I’m not sure.
I just couldn’t resist.
Jan 5th, 2009 / 4:25 pm
I do remember a few fonts that aimed to include every glyph known to man. The maker wasn’t done, but it included glyphs from a few hundred scripts – which includes all commonly known scripts. It is free and Goog turned up this: http://www.code2000.net/
More refs…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code2000
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode_typefaces
Jan 5th, 2009 / 4:26 pm
Arial Unicode MS has enough for those languages, and in case you’d rather die than use Arial, there’s a list on wikipedia here: http://is.gd/eDbh
Code2000 is rather interesting, albeit utterly hideous.
Jan 5th, 2009 / 4:26 pm
Comic Sans has every single character and glyph, making it a beastly 1.2gig font.
Too bad it’s Comic Sans.
Jan 5th, 2009 / 4:36 pm
Surprised nobody has mentioned Fixedsys Excelsior:
http://www.fixedsysexcelsior.com/
Jan 5th, 2009 / 8:51 pm
Myriad pro worked fine for me!
Just made a folder in 27 languages and it worked just fine.
Jan 6th, 2009 / 4:21 am
Myriad pro worked fine for me!
Just made a folder in 27 languages and it worked just fine.
Jan 6th, 2009 / 4:21 am
Frankly, any properly made UTF-8 font has all characters in the mentioned alphabets.
A far as I know all “classic MS fonts” are available in UTF-8 encoding. At least.
But I have to say, I was never in the situation of having to use other alphabets than the latin. So this is theory to me and I wouldn’t guarantee anything…
Jan 6th, 2009 / 4:37 am
With Myriad Pro we had problems with Uzbek cyrylic. As far as i remember there were not 3-4 signs.
Jan 6th, 2009 / 6:41 am
Your key Microsoft (Arial and the like) fonts would cover most of the Unicode characters. I know Microsoft makes special fonts for Japanese characters (e.g., MS Mincho), so I guess they are not included in the main fonts.
Jan 6th, 2009 / 7:40 am
check this out:
http://tinyurl.com/5dsag
Jan 6th, 2009 / 2:53 pm
Last time I heard it was that thing called ARIAL unicode.
It’s the most complete font ever made.
Jan 6th, 2009 / 6:25 pm