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

[Brian Chandler <brian@example.com>]

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