Get supported characters of a font - in C#

Question

I have a third party font with support for japanese characters which I need to use for an application. Whenever a character is not supported by this font, the often seen rectangle ("default character") is drawn. Obviously not all japanese characters are supported, because if I try to draw the translations that our translation office gave us, there are a lot of rectangles.

I need to be notified whenever a not supported character is used, so that I can change the font for this single character (like Word does it) or implement some other reaction to that.

Any ideas? If I could extract a list of unicode characters from the TTF file, then I would be able to check whether a used character is covered by this list. But how can I do so?

Answer 1

Can't you just pull it up in Character Map and take note of the character ranges that are not defined?

There's probably a programmatic way to parse a TTF file for this information but if it's just one particular font then it's probably easier just to open Character Map, set the Group by to Unicode Subrange and Group by "Japanese Hiragana/Katakana" and just take note of the defined ranges.

Answer 2

What's the use of a font that doesn't support half of the characters? Why don't you just stick with Arial Unicode MS or other standard fonts?