What Is a Unicode Font

A Unicode font is a font that covers a large portion of the Unicode character set to support multiple written languages. For example, Arial Unicode MS and GNU Unifont are considered to be Unicode fonts.

What Is Unicode Font? A Unicode font is an instance of typeface that defines how glyphs of the Unicode character set will be displayed or printed.

Since Unicode character set is so big, 120,737 characters in Unicode 8.0, we do not have any true Unicode font that covers the entire Unicode character set. But we do have some fonts that cover enough Unicode characters to support most commonly used European, Arabic and Asian languages. Those fonts can be considered Unicode fonts. Below are some examples of Unicode font families:

1. Arial Unicode MS - It covers 50,377 glyphs/characters and produced by Monotype Corporation. The picture below shows some glyphs displayed in "Arial Unicode MS 12pt Bold" font:

Arial Unicode MS 12pt Bold
Sample Glyphs in "Arial Unicode MS 12pt Bold" Font

2. GNU Unifont - It covers 63,449 glyphs/characters and produced by Roman Czyborra. The picture below shows some glyphs displayed in "GNU Unifont 12pt Bold" font. They look not as good as the "Arial Unicode MS 12pt Bold" font.

GNU Unifont 12pt Bold
Sample Glyphs in "GNU Unifont 12pt Bold" Font

Table of Contents

 About This Book

 Character Sets and Encodings

 ASCII Character Set and Encoding

 GB2312 Character Set and Encoding

 GB18030 Character Set and Encoding

 JIS X0208 Character Set and Encodings

 Unicode Character Set

 UTF-8 (Unicode Transformation Format - 8-Bit)

 UTF-16, UTF-16BE and UTF-16LE Encodings

 UTF-32, UTF-32BE and UTF-32LE Encodings

 Python Language and Unicode Characters

 Java Language and Unicode Characters

 Character Encoding in Java

 Character Set Encoding Maps

 Encoding Conversion Programs for Encoded Text Files

 Using Notepad as a Unicode Text Editor

 Using Microsoft Word as a Unicode Text Editor

 Using Microsoft Excel as a Unicode Text Editor

Unicode Fonts

 What Is a Font

What Is a Unicode Font

 Downloading and Installing GNU Unifont

 Windows Tool "Character Map"

 Archived Tutorials

 References

 Full Version in PDF/EPUB