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



David Smith wrote:
2008/03/12 (Wed) 15:44:45 に Brian Chandler さんは書きました:
Dave M G wrote:
Godwin, Stephen,

<snip>

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:

Yes, sure. This is what I meant by a "conglomerate" font. But I doubt there is a human alive who could even begin to voice an opinion on the overall uniformity of a "typeface" that tried to cover everything. Between any two wildly different scripts, there will be techniques that can be used to try to achieve some sort of uniformity, but it's hard to imagine there are any attempts even made to do this for three (such as Chinese, Arabic, and Latin), let alone more. Japanese-English, of course, brutalises the descenders...


http://imaginatorium.org/words/descend.htm

 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.

Yes, of course - something like this is invaluable. Just not what anyone could call a "typeface".


Brian Chandler
http://imaginatorium.org




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