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

[Brian Chandler <brian@example.com>]

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