Unicode typefaces

Unicode typefaces (also known as UCS fonts and Unicode fonts) contains wide range of characters, letters, digits, glyphs, symbols, ideograms, logograms, etc, which are collectively mapped into Universal Character Set, also known as, UCS (which is an international standard ISO/IEC 10646), derived from many different languages, scripts from all around the world. Thus, only one font is able to display vast range of characters, from different languages.

Unicode (ISO 10646 UCS) standard does not encode the font (collections of graphical shapes called glyphs) itself, but rather instead, it defines the abstract characters in a specific (codepoint) place and also defines the required changes of shape depending on the context they're used in (by using Combining characters). It also defines precomposed versions of most letter/diacritic combinations in normal use, so that, the conversion to and from the legacy encodings (of locale languages) becomes simpler and allows applications to use Unicode as an internal text format without having to implement combining characters. Different encodings, with their different number of byte scheme, can refer to the same Unicode codepoint (glyph).

Many fonts have kerning pairs which implements better spacing in between the letters. Many scripts (language) have special orthographic rules which require that certain combinations of letterforms (alternative symbol for the same letter) be combined into special ligature forms (mixed characters), these rules are vast and complex, and requires script-shaping technologies (which are also known as Rendering Technology or Engine) to tell the Operating System and User Agent, of how to properly output different characters and its parts' for ligature formation. These complex instructions are embedded inside fonts. User's operating system uses rendering engine(s) to translate (Unicode) strings into graphics of displayable characters.

Computer fonts uses various techniques to display the characters or glyphs. A bitmap fonts contains series of dots or pixels for representing the image of each glyph in each face and size. Outline fonts (also known as Vector fonts) uses drawing instructions or mathematical formulas to describe each glyph. Stroke fonts uses a series of specified lines (for the glyph's border) and additional information to define the profile, or size and shape of the line in a specific face and size, which together describe the appearance of the glyph. For more, please see Computer font.

Currently (July, 2006) Unicode fonts do not include all UCS characters defined in the present revision of ISO 10646 standard. Their creators are updating them with more characters, which were not included previously, or, were not placed correctly, or, including their own characters, or, updating them with new characters defined in the newer standard revision of ISO 10646.

The UCS has over 1.1 million code points, but only the first 65,536 (the Plane 0: Basic Multilingual Plane, or BMP) had entered into common use before 2000. See the Mapping of Unicode characters article for more information on other planes (Plane 1: SMP, Plane 2: SIP, Plane 14: SSP, Plane 15 and 16: reserved for PUA) and therein included character blocks of scripts for different languages, dialects, etc.

First Unicode font (with very large character set, and supporting many Unicode blocks) was Lucida Sans Unicode, it was developed by Charles Bigelow & Kris Holmes' in March, 1993 (Shipped with Windows NT 3.1). Second was Unihan font, developed by Ross Paterson in 1993. Third was Everson Mono Unicode font, released in 1995, developed by Michael Everson.

Issues

There are typographical ambiguities in Unicode, so that some of the unified Chinese characters will be typographically different in different regions. For example, Unicode point U+9AA8 (骨) is typographically different between simplified Chinese and traditional Chinese. This has implications for the idea that a single typeface can satisfy the needs of all localesKen Lunde, CJKV Information Processing, O'Reilly Inc, 1999. Page 128, "CJKV character form differences".

Application of Unicode typefaces

Beside all the issues, Unicode is now the base character set for many new standards and protocols, and is built into the architecture of operating systems (Microsoft Windows, Apple Mac OS X, and many versions of Unix), programming languages (Perl, Python, Java, Common LISP, APL), and libraries (IBM International Components for Unicode (ICU) along with the Pango, Graphite, Scribe, Uniscribe, and ATSUI rendering engines), font formats (TrueType and OpenType) and so on. Many other standards are also getting upgraded to Unicode compliancy, day by day.

Utility software

Utility software such as the Character Map applet included with Windows 2000/XP, MainType (by HighLogic. Commercial, 40-day trial version is available), BabelMap (by Andrew West. Free, donation-ware.), Unicode Font Viewer (by Mike Lischke. Freeware), Quick Key (by Nathanael Jones. Opensource, free.), etc, can be used to see exactly which characters are included, inside a font file.

List of Unicode fonts

Out of many Unicode fonts, only few are listed below, which are mostly and commonly used by the (mainstream) majority of users around the world, in major platforms. Unicode font list with more fonts can be found in this (List of typefaces) article's "Unicode fonts" section. Free software Unicode typefaces gives more detail on free typefaces.

Unicode Fonts
	Glyphs	Kerning	Version	Font Family	Font style	Font type	Serif style	Other Info
Arial	1,419	1,674	909	3.00	Arial	Regular	OTF+TTO	Normal Sans	Comes with Microsoft Windows.
Arial Unicode MS	38,917	50,377	0	1.00	Arial Unicode MS	Regular	OTF+TTO	Normal Sans	Comes with Microsoft Office.
Bitstream Cyberbit	32,910	29,934	935	2.0 beta	Bitstream Cyberbit	Roman	TT	Cove	Freeware, for non-commercial use only.
Cardo	2,879	2,882	216	0.098 (2004)	Cardo	Regular	TT	Cove	Freeware, for non-commercial and non-profit uses only.
Caslon Roman	3,684	3,686	0	001.000 16-12-2001	Caslon	Roman	TT		BSD-like license.
Code2000	51,239	61,864	115	1.16	Code2000	Regular	TT	Any	Shareware. A reduced version, Code2001, is available as freeware.
Charis SIL	1,958	3,084	0	4.002	Charis SIL	Regular	TT	Any	OFL
Chryſanþi Unicode (Chrysanthi Unicode)	4,818	4,383	0	3.1	Chrysanthi Unicode	Regular	TT	Cove	Freeware.
ClearlyU	-	9,538	0	1.9	-	-	-	-	Freeware.
DejaVu fonts (DejaVu Sans)	3,525	3,611	2,558	2.8	DejaVu Sans	Book	TT	Normal Sans	Freeware.
Doulos SIL	1,958	3,083	0	4.014	Doulos SIL	Regular	TT	Any	OFL
Everson Mono (Everson Mono Unicode)	4,893	4,899	0	4.1.3Version info of Everson Mono Unicode 3.2b4 font is "Macromedia Fontographer 4.1.3 2003-02-13".	Everson Mono Unicode	Regular	TT	Any	Monospaced. Shareware.
FreeSerif	3,914	5,257	0	1.52	FreeSerif	Medium	TT	Cove	GPL. Sans serif (FreeSans) and monospaced (FreeMono) variants.
Gentium (Gentium Regular)	1,469	1,699	2,857	1.0.2 (2005)	Gentium	Regular	TT	Any	OFL
GNU Unifont	33,580	33,583	0	001.000	unifont	Medium	TT	Any	GPL
Junicode	1,925	1,929	0	0.6.11	Junicode	Regular	TT	Any	GPL
Lucida Grande	2,245	2,826	0	5.0d8e1 (Revesion 1.002)	Lucida Grande	Regular	-	Normal Sans	Comes with Mac OS X. Any proportion.
Lucida Sans Unicode	1,765	1,776	0	2.00	Lucida Sans Unicode	Regular	OTF+TTO	Normal Sans	Comes with Microsoft Windows.
Microsoft Sans Serif	2,301	2,257	0	1.41	Microsoft Sans Serif	Regular	OTF+TTO	Normal Sans	Comes with Microsoft Windows.
New Gulim	46,567	49,284	0	3.10	New Gulim	Regular	TT	Obtuse Cove	Came with MS Office 2000. Any Proportion.
Tahoma	1,912	2,034	674	3.14	Tahoma	Regular	OTF+TTO	Normal Sans	Comes with Microsoft Windows.
Times New Roman	1,419	1,674	867	3.00	Times New Roman	Regular	OTF+TTO	Cove	Comes with Microsoft Windows.
TITUS Cyberbit Basic	9,341	10,044	0	3.0 (2000) (Revision 4.00)	TITUS Cyberbit Basic	Regular	TT	Cove	Freeware.
Y.OzFontN	21,360	59,678	0	9.41	Y.OzFontN	Regular	TT	Any	Freeware. Sans-serif (for Japanese) and Monospace (for Latin).
	Glyphs	Kerning	Version	Font Family	Font style	Font type	Serif style	Other Info
Unicode Fonts

:Note::OTF+TTO

U+2192.gif

Font type: OpenType font with TrueType outlines.:TT

U+2192.gif

Font type: TrueType font.

Comparison of fonts

Number of characters included by the above version of fonts, for different Unicode blocks (or, ranges), are listed below.

0000-077F

: N  = Numerical digits. This number of characters are included in the font for that range.: = Most or some portion out of all characters in that range are present in the font.: X  = No characters are included in the font for that range or Unicode block.:  -  = Data not available now.

Unicode Fonts
U+2192.gif

Range 

U+21B4.gif

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