"Universal" font

[_Gaelle_Meheut_]

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 !!!

[_Gaelle_Meheut_]

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 :/

[Neil_Keller]

Some foundries do not permit their fonts to be embedded.

Neil

[Thomas Phinney]

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

[_Gaelle_Meheut_]

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 ?

[_Aandi_Inston_]

>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

[_Gaelle_Meheut_]

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")