Audience

This tutorial is intended for anyone involved in the specification, production or implementation of fonts or products which support two or more script systems. Attendees should have a knowledge of their proposed project in terms of desired language or character set coverage as well as technical constraints such as data size, hardware and software support.

Summary

As the number of defined code points in The Unicode Standard grows, there is a corresponding desire to have fonts that can display the characters. However, there are many unforeseen consequences of packing numerous characters from different scripts -- many of which have widely varying properties and behaviors -- into a single font file. We'll examine some of the more common and vexing issues we've encountered in building large multi-script fonts, as well as share some observations of how customers have implemented them. We'll also show some examples and suggest some practical workarounds.