Unicode and fonts.

Question

Hi,

This is something that I don't see much discussed. I'm developing a software that will support multilingualism, thus, I would need to use Unicode compatible fonts, right? Where could I possibly find such fonts and how would I know for sure they support Chinese, Korean, Japanese, whatever there exist?

It's a shame you can't use beautiful fonts found in the Internet, because most of them support ASCII only.

Answer 1

http://www.alanwood.net/unicode/fonts.html

Alan Wood's site has alot of Unicode fonts. By each font there is a list explaining which languages is supported by it.

Another great site is the fontguide at Unifont. To find it just google for it, don't have the reputation to link it yet. When there, just click the continent-tabs at top of the site to view fonts including languages from those countries.

Answer 2

From my unicode/font bookmark collection

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category%3AFree%5Fsoftware%5FUnicode%5Ftypefaces

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode%5Ftypefaces

http://unifoundry.com/unifont.html

http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/font/index.htm

http://www.alanwood.net/unicode/fontsbyrange.html

http://www.alanwood.net/unicode/fonts.html

http://www.unifont.org/fontguide/

http://www.wazu.jp/index.html

Answer 3

Just to make sure: do not expect to find a font that supports Chinese Traditional, Chinese Simplified, and Japanese.

There are glyph differences for the same Unicode code points, so a native user will immediately spot that you are not using the proper font for their language.

For a web application it is probably best to give a list of fonts, and in the list you need a typical Windows font, a typical Mac font, and a generic one (like "serif").

Tagging the html page (or the paragraph) with the proper lang tag will help some (smarter) browsers to select the right font if the specific ones are not installed.