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



Dave M G wrote:
Godwin, Stephen,

Thank you for responding.

I seem to need to have the difference between encoding and fonts explained to me over and over. I can't ever quite keep it straight.

In any case, is there no such thing as a font that can handle any and all scripts?

How does Google manage it? It seems possible to come up with searches in any language and all scripts seem to display properly.

That should be easy to work out. Fonts are about making shapes on screens and paper - all google ever sends you is a bunch of 8-bit bytes, every one guaranteed to be a value from 0 to 255 inclusive (unless you've caught a virus<g>). So Google has nothing to do with the fonts used to make marks on your screen - your browser (unless you're using a well-known browser-like-OS-component) asks your window system to convert Google's bytes into shapes, using an appropriate font. (Or not: have you done any Google searches in Gujerati lately?)


I believe there are conglomerate "fonts" that provide a shape for (almost?) all unicode values, but it's obviously not going to be possible to find a type designer who just happens to know about Latin, Greek, Cyrillic, Hebrew, Arabic, Devanagari, those squiggly jobs in south India and Burma/Thailand, Chinese, Hangul, and kana, so there will never be a "unified" typeface across all of those scripts.

Brian Chandler
http://imaginatorium.org





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