Unicode TTF containing CJK?

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <turnbull@example.com>]

>>>>> "Marc" == Marc Christensen <marc@example.com> writes:

    Marc> Anyone know of some good recommendations for unicode
    Marc> truetype fonts which have good CJK and other language
    Marc> characters sets?

As far as I know there are none, period.  Not even from Microsoft,
although this may have changed over the last year.  The problem is
that all fonts to date are either rather incomplete or are pasted
together from Unicode subsets, which don't always match.

Microsoft's best come damn close, though.  IIRC only Icelandic and
Turkish (Latin 5?) had "anomolies" in the extensions of Courier and
Arial to Unicode.

    Marc> Many references to this font states that it is a Unicode
    Marc> font but when I install the font, and get a listing of which
    Marc> font's the file contained, it lists all iso8859 encodings.

Yep.  Unicode doesn't mean you're prohibited from subsetting.  This is
especially important in fonts because it's entirely unclear what the
Japanese equivalent of (say) Courier is.

    Marc>   The GNU-unifont lists all it's font's as being iso10646
    Marc> encoded so I assume that that is the iso specification for
    Marc> unicode - right?

Sort of.  ISO 10646 specifies a universal coded character set.
Unicode specifies not only the CCS (which in fact is delegated to the
ISO working group for 10646), but also many other aspects of text
handling.  Sometimes "ISO 10646" is used to mean a 4-byte wide
character encoding, but that is technically incorrect.  The proper
usage is UTF-32 (and UCS-4, which is deprecated).

    Marc> So, is iso8859 a subset of unicode?  Is Unicode a superset
    Marc> of 8859?

Yes and no.  The characters of the ISO 8859 encodings are a subset of
ISO 10646, but except for ISO 8859/1, they are not subencodings.  That
is, the encoded value of 8859/1 characters is always the same in 10646
but this is not true for other 8859/N sets.

    Marc> What other TTFs are available besides Cyberbit?  Commercial
    Marc> and free?

I don't know of any other free TTFs with as much coverage as Cyberbit.
AFAIK the GNU unifont is not available as TTF, it's X11 BDF.  The same
is true for the X11 unifont for the xterm (if that's different from
the GNU unifont, which I never did get clarified).

    Marc> Anyone tried Agfa/s Monotype?  Are there ay good free
    Marc> unicode fonts arownd?

My preference is to use a substrate like Mule which can present each
language in fonts designed for it, rather than limiting me to unifonts.

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