Is Arial Unicode MS right font for WinForms UI?

Question

We have .NET WinForms based application and it is expected to work on at least 9 languages including

1. English
2. Spanish
3. Russian
4. Simplified Chinese
5. Traditional Chinese
6. Korean
7. Japanese

Our application shall work on Windows XP (SP3), Vista, Windows 7 and Windows 2003 & 2008 operation systems.

We have never used Arial Unicode MS for localization. We have used Tahoma, a font face will be linked to various system font at run time.

Anybody have opinion on using Arial Unicode MS for application font with above listed languages? Technically it should work, but we don't know any limitations.

Answer 1

I'll assume you meant Arial. That font is not available in a default Windows install, you got it by installing Microsoft Office. If you want to use it, you'll have purchase a license from the type foundry (Agfa Monotype, probably) and deploy it with your installer. If my memory still serves me, it was 95 bucks for 15 installs.

Do note that using a font like this is rarely necessary in practice. The common Windows fonts will have the glyphs that a local user needs to read text in her local language. You would only need a full font implementation if, say, a Russian user would want to use the Chinese localization for some reason.

Be sure to test your app by installing it on the local language versions of Windows that you target. You can get those versions through an MSDN subscription.

Answer 2

Michael Kaplan says that Arial Unicode is a bad idea as a first resort

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2007/07/15/3890144.aspx

Answer 3

As far as I understand (although I may not understand this at all, you need to read Michael Kaplan) the correct way to handle unicode display is NOT to rely on one font having all the glyphs you need. Instead, research on MLang which does basically this: you give it a line you want to draw, it returns you several chunks + the font for each. For the english part it'll return english font, for the japanese part the japanese font, and so on.

Answer 4

The best approach is to use whatever font the user has specified as their system's default. You dont want to lock them in to a specific font as some users may have visual limitations that require them to use alternate fonts and sizes.