From: Douglas Davidson (ddavidso@apple.com)
Date: Thu May 29 2008 - 14:12:36 CDT
On May 29, 2008, at 11:57 AM, John H. Jenkins wrote:
> TrueType (TTF) fonts cannot contain more than 65536 glyphs. Since
> there are over 100,000 graphic characters in Unicode 5.1 (and over
> 75,000 Han ideographs alone), there is no such font and cannot be.
Furthermore, even if it were possible, it would still probably be
better over the long run to bite the bullet and accept the necessity
of dealing with (a) multiple fonts, and (b) characters not covered by
any available font. The characters of Unicode come from so many
different stylistic traditions that placing them all into a single
font would be necessarily something of an artificial exercise;
employing individual fonts designed for the writing systems they
handle is far more natural. Furthermore, once you finally achieve the
coverage you want, a new version of Unicode will come along, or a PUA
character will make its way into your data, and you will have to deal
with uncovered characters anyway.
Douglas Davidson
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