Unicode font in international application

  • Thread starter Thread starter Joerg
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Joerg

I am in the process of creating an international GUI application with C# on
..NET1.1 (Win2k), which is supposed to implement a particular look/design. In
order to achieve this, I plan amongst others to define a certain font (MS
Arial Unicode) for the user controls, and provide custom controls which have
the font property fixed set to this font.

The application is supposed to be used in different countries (including
China), so I wonder whether the MS Arial Unicode font decision is a "good
choice". Are there alternatives which cover the typeset requirements
similarly well of different counties? And what would happen, if the selected
font is not installed on a client?

Are there other (better/safer) approaches to the goal of a certain font
setting in an international application?
 
Joerg said:
I am in the process of creating an international GUI application with C# on
.NET1.1 (Win2k), which is supposed to implement a particular look/design. In
order to achieve this, I plan amongst others to define a certain font (MS
Arial Unicode) for the user controls, and provide custom controls which have
the font property fixed set to this font.

The application is supposed to be used in different countries (including
China), so I wonder whether the MS Arial Unicode font decision is a "good
choice". Are there alternatives which cover the typeset requirements
similarly well of different counties? And what would happen, if the selected
font is not installed on a client?

Are there other (better/safer) approaches to the goal of a certain font
setting in an international application?
Click to expand...

Arial Unicode contains much fewer characters than some other currently
available Unicode fonts.

See http://www.alanwood.net/unicode/fonts.html for many large Unicode
fonts currently available as well as many for particular languages or
scripts.

No standard font technology currently allows all the characters
currently defined in Unicode to be included in a single font. There
are too many.

The best strategy is probably to do what the Mozilla and Netscape
browsers do. Set default fonts for particular scripts and languages
but allow the user to change them.

For any character it must display the browser looks first for the font
set as default for those characters and if the character does not
appear or there is no default font for those characters, then it looks
through all fonts on the system until it finds one with the character
assigned and displays that glyph.

Only if no character is found does it display a symbol indicating a
missing character.

The Macintosh operating system works the same with the addition of a
Last Resort font that has a small number of pictorial glyphs assigned
which gives information about the script of the missing character and
the range in which it is found.

See http://developer.apple.com/fonts/LastResortFont.


Jim Allan
 
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