keskiviikko 21. tammikuuta 2009

Many Unicode glyphs are missing

Many Unicode glyphs are missing from Windows 7's fonts. Unicode 5.1 has 100,713 characters. Unicode 5.2 will have even more! According to this, Arial Unicode MS has "only" 38,917 characters! Even worse: You have to buy Microsoft Office to get the Arial Unicode MS font legally!

According to Wikipedia:
Currently (August, 2008), no single "Unicode font" includes all the characters defined in the present revision of the ISO 10646 (Unicode) standard. In fact, it would be impossible to create such a font in any common font format, as Unicode includes over 100,000 characters, while no widely-used font format supports more than 65,535 glyphs. So while one could make a set of related fonts to cover all of Unicode, a single Unicode font is not possible at this time.
To-do for Microsoft:
  • Windows 7 should have Unicode fonts with all the glyphs in Unicode 5.2.

  • Update your font format so that it can handle well over 100,000 characters/glyphs!
Lähettänyt klo

4 kommenttia:

  1. I have been told that Windows 7 is much richer in supporting Unicode then Vista.. Did you test this with Windows 7 ?
    Thanks,
    GerardM

    VastaaPoista

  2. GerardM: Thanks for you reply! Yes, Windows 7 has more fonts than Windows Vista, but I would like to see a single Unicode font, which has all the Unicode glyphs. I think we are still far from it, but 7 is definitely an improvement.

    VastaaPoista

  3. Kirjoittaja on poistanut tämän kommentin.

    VastaaPoista

  4. n4te: "Fonts are limited to 65536 glyphs, so no font can have all characters."

    Yes, but they should update their font formats, so that they could handle over 65536 glyphs...

    VastaaPoista

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