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_Gaelle_Meheut_
Participating Frequently
Jul 10, 2008 11:40 AM UTC
Question

"Universal" font

Hello everybody !!!!

I'm looking for a font that can handles every type of characters, from the latin alphabet till the cyrillic alphabet via the asiatic alphabets (japanese, chinese, ..). I though that Lucida Grande would do it, but apparently not (when I embed this font on my appli, it doens't display correctly the characters..). With a japanese character I though that I would have manage to find it, but unfortunately the russian is craply displayed (with a huge letter-spacing)
So do you know if this magic font exist or how to find it ?

In other case, do you know how to find the character palette on the mac that would list me all the font available on my mac and which alphabet these fonts handle ?

Or maybe a website with fonts and their cover ?

Thanks a lot for any help !!!
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    30 replies

    _Gaelle_Meheut_Author
    Participating Frequently
    Sep 29, 2008 6:02 AM UTC
    Hi Andi, thanks for the answer, thing is that I don't know how to do it using css in flex... For the moment, I'm declaring a font to use, and I embedded this font into normal, bold and italic. But if I use another font in the bold declaration for instance, then it takes the non embedded font first declared (font-family = "Lucida Grande")
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    _Gaelle_Meheut_Author
    Participating Frequently
    Sep 26, 2008 7:03 AM UTC
    Thanks for your message. In fact I choose Lucida Grande for every alphabet except the Asian ones. I've choosen Osaka for the japanese font, and I'm actually looking for a good chinese alphabet for TAIWANESE font (If people know some on mac/flash).
    By the way I notice that those asian fonts usually don't handle the bold !!! (or such slicely that it's barely visible...) Do somebody know a way to do it ?
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    _Aandi_Inston_
    Participating Frequently
    Sep 28, 2008 6:55 AM UTC
    >By the way I notice that those asian fonts usually don't handle the bold !!!

    You mean you are using fake-bold, and it isn't working well? Avoid
    fake bold at all costs, this is considered the enemy of good
    typography. Select a font designed in bold, and switch to use it
    whenever bold is needed.nSimilarly italics.

    Aandi Inston
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    Thomas Phinney
    Inspiring
    Sep 25, 2008 1:48 PM UTC
    Just to corect my original post, it turns out that Arial Unicode MS does have the multiple forms needed to support both Chinese and Japanese. However, you'd need to be working with an app that supports the 'locl' OpenType feature.

    In another comment: The closer you can get to a universal font is the DejaVu font project.

    There are a number of other fonts with vastly greater Unicode coverage than DejaVu. As noted, it is missing Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. As the original poster was specifically looking for Chinese and Japanese, it is not a reasonable recommendation.

    That being said, for Latin and Latin-related writing systems, the DejaVu fonts have pretty good coverage.

    Cheers,

    T
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    Neil_Keller
    Known Participant
    Sep 22, 2008 1:29 PM UTC
    Some foundries do not permit their fonts to be embedded.

    Neil
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    _Gaelle_Meheut_Author
    Participating Frequently
    Sep 22, 2008 9:48 AM UTC
    sorry but the arial unicode Msis the only font I managed to embedded in Flash that permits displaying all the characters.. otherwise I still have square on my korean alphabet :/
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    _Benoit_Favreault_
    Participant
    Jul 24, 2008 6:56 PM UTC
    Hi,

    Sorry to answer so lately, I'm just coming back home.

    The closer you can get to a universal font is the DejaVu font project. DejaVu font family is an OpenType (and open source) flavour of the Bitstream Vera fonts. The aim of the project is to improve typographic quality and language coverage. It actually supports a wide portion of the Unicode Latin blocs, and many more. Arabic is partially covered as for Hebrew and many supplements. Few Chinese characters are included for now and there's no Japanese. CJK is on the roadmap.

    The project site: http://dejavu.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Main_Page
    and, for the language coverage: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DejaVu_fonts

    Benoît Favreault
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    Thomas Phinney
    Inspiring
    Jul 23, 2008 12:30 AM UTC
    Just to be absolutely clear, you'll need a separate font for EACH of: Japanese, Korean, Simplified Chinese (mainland China) and Traditional Chinese (Taiwan and many expatriate communities).

    Cheers,

    T
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    _Aandi_Inston_
    Participating Frequently
    Jul 23, 2008 6:03 AM UTC
    When you come to that point, may I mention the book "CJKV Information
    Processing", just in case you don't have it. At around 1000 pages it
    isn't lightweight but it does contain a lot of information to explain
    the special needs of working with Far Eastern fonts.

    Aandi Inston
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    _Gaelle_Meheut_Author
    Participating Frequently
    Jul 22, 2008 7:09 AM UTC
    well, okay, according to all the problem Arial seems to provok : incorrect handle of the asian characters (even if from my point of view, it seemed to be okay), moreover the fact that the bold can not be displayed. We choose for the moment to keep the Lucida Grande, and only with latin and cyrillic alphabets. When I'll have to manage the asian characters, I think I'll choose one for japan and chinese alphabets, and one for korean.

    Many thanks for your help that permits me seeing more clearly in typography !
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    Thomas Phinney
    Inspiring
    Jul 19, 2008 6:15 AM UTC
    > And it can display correctly all the languages supported by the application (latin, japanese, chinese, korean... <<br />
    No, it cannot. See my posts above.

    T
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    _Gaelle_Meheut_Author
    Participating Frequently
    Jul 16, 2008 12:05 PM UTC
    Pfff ..
    Yeah I just tryed what you asked me, the italic is correctly displayed, but for the bold I have a problem.. In fact, the difference between a bold and a non bold is quite invisible. I'm going to do more work on this.. Maybe another font can handle the bold ?
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    _Aandi_Inston_
    Participating Frequently
    Jul 18, 2008 3:07 PM UTC
    Arial Unicode is one font in one weight. While Arial is four fonts.

    And are you not concerned about the Han character issue, which means
    it is not really suitable for Japanese, Korean, one Chinese, as
    discussed above?

    Aandi Inston
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