Re: [tlug] Freely distributable Japanese capable utf8 font?

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@example.com>]

Dave M G writes:

 > I thought that's what utf-8 was - the ability to display any language.

No.  It's a particular code which is universal in the sense that each
character has a unique code, but the repertoire of any given font is
entirely up to the font designer.

Technically speaking, UTF-8 is a particular representation of Unicode
which is a one-to-one mapping of characters to non-negative integers
(by design, in practice it's more complicated than that but it comes
close).  This has nothing to do with fonts, except that since Unicode
gives a unique code to each character, it's a convenient
representation of the characters that a font provides.

Also, by design, Unicode per se does not prohibit subsetting; AFAIK
you're not even required to handle ASCII.