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

[David Smith <david.daniel.smith@example.com>]

2008/03/12 (Wed) 15:44:45 に Brian Chandler さんは書きました:
> 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.

Actually creating a single font that coverse the entire Unicode Universal 
Character Set (UCS) is precisely the mission of the GNU FreeFont project:

 http://www.gnu.org/software/freefont/

It's not a bad font, but as far as readability goes it is definitely far 
behind the typical favorites like Bitstream Vera for latin-1. But, it's a 
great fallback to have installed when your browser tries to render some 
Gujerati and you'd rather see the characters, even if you can't read 
Gujerati, then squares or other mojibake. It's also not 100% complete, but 
it's probably the one font that covers the broadest swath of Unicode 
currently.

Cheers,
dds
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