"Universal" font

Gaelle,

do you have bold or italic text in your documents?

Make a print of Polish or Cyrillic text with and without bold and/or italic formatting and compare them with standard Arial with bold/italic.

You will see the quality difference.

Also: If you still want to go that way, be warned that different printers handle electronic bold-ing and oblique-ing differently. Up to the point of ignoring it.

In my opinion: A bad decision with many drawbacks.

- Michael

Hello everybody !
Well, in fact, I managed to do what I wanted using Arial Unicode MS. And it can display correctly all the languages supported by the application (latin, japanese, chinese, korean, polish, cyrillic alphabets) so I believe it was the "universal font" I was looking for. Awesome ! Thanks a lot for your help !!!!

I believe Michael is correct. Whichever forms they picked, they did pick one set. So like any other font currently available, Arial Unicode isn't good for more than one of [Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Japanese, Korean].

Cheers,

T

AFAIK Arial Unicode MS uses Chinese glyph styles. It also reports itself as being a Chinese font to certain applications on Windows (not sure where I saw that).

- Michael

You'll need multiple fonts for East Asian languages. Specifically, separate fonts for each of simplified and traditional Chinese, Japanese, and Korean.

As I wrote just the other day on Typophile, the particularly thorny problem is dealing with the Han unification characters. Basically, for certain East Asian characters, There are slightly (or sometimes very) different designs for certain characters for all these different languages. Currently, the only functional way to distinguish them is to build an OpenType font with the locl (locale) feature, and use apps/OSes that process that feature correctly for those languages.

Im not sure how widespread such app/OS support is for the locl feature with those languages, outside of InDesign CS3, but I know that such fonts are pretty much non-existent in the wild. AFAIK, thus far such fonts have only been built by mad scientists in labs (pace Adobe's own Dr Lunde & Mr Meyer).

Because of the potential for great efficiency (space savings), I imagine we will see such fonts in the wild in the future.

Cheers,

T

You mean Asian, not " Asiatic ".

http://www.tfd.com/asiatic

Thanks for the answer.. Indeed, that's what I will do I think it's the best solution, use one for all the font except asiatic, then manage the asiatic alphabets with another font !

Many folks wanted to have a single font for all purposes and "Arial Unicode MS" is the one many people use. But it is basically a bad idea, not only because this font has no bold or italic variants, it also has no kerning pairs. The result are ugly documents with bolded and obliqued characters.

Unicode is a standard that assigns a number to each character, but does not take into account differing typographic traditions. Please read the answer to question 3 "Does the unified Han encoding..." at this page:

http://unicode.org/faq/han_cjk.html

I would say you better look for a font that contains all Latin/Cyrillic/Greek glyphs, and a specialized font for Chinese, Japanese and Korean. This approach will give you far greater quality.

Hey !!! Yep Ifound this part, but in fact, that was not what I was expected.. When I said "character palette" I was thinking something where you can see which alphabets each fonts is managing. But I still haven't found it.. :(

Your can access the character palette from the input menu in system prefs.

Search on: "Finding characters for different languages on your keyboard" in the Mac help system.