The Graphics and Mathematical Blocks for example often do not work with character extensions across multiple lines. But they mostly suffer when you simply want a fixed-width font that really is FIXED-WIDTH! And while they implement a larger range of glyphs, including he latest emoji. I have tried to use the newer, GTK and Truetype unicode fonts.
The ONLY standard install font I have ever found that works with a good range of unicode blocks encoded is.
But as noted above, don't count on correct workings of complex scripts or typography. Still, if you're only looking for glyph support: See also Michael Kaplan's take on this: Arial Unicode MS effectively.
The preferred way is actually to let the rendering engine sort out script support for fonts and not try to cram it all into a single font. As a fallback mechanism, but never as a first choice. It's a major undertaking and as such it's not surprising that pretty much the only fonts covering large portions of Unicode are last-resort fonts, intended to be used when no other font exists to display something. Remember that for the font to work other things must be in place as well: properly defined diacritics support (so combining accents actually appear above/below the base characters and not somewhere next to them), precomposed glyphs for some scripts so the rendering engine can use them properly, this includes Arabic and and Indic scripts. Also it's a common misconception that a single font for as many scripts as possible is a Good Thing™. However, there can't be a single font covering most of Unicode, as OpenType is limited to 65536 glyphs and there are more code points assigned so far. And enough of Latin to support most European languages. 歹 CID+22656 uni6B79-JP) and mapped to KR/TW/HK, and the CN glyph is the only one region that has only the bottom touching (CID+22657 uni6B79-CN).Īlso noted in #326, this component is unnecessarily different between regions.Nearly every font nowadays covers at least Latin, Greek and Cyrillic. However, in other cases, the JP glyph is the one that has both top and bottom touching (e.g. 夕 for JP (also KR and CN) is mapped to CID+14039 with the name uni5915-JP that has only the bottom touching, while 夕 with both top and bottom touching is at CID+14040 at uni5915-TW, which only maps to TW and HK.
With reference to Kozuka Gothic Pro on Adobe Fonts, there seem to be a design change when developing Source Han Sans (JP): most characters (with the exception of 夕 itself) with 夕 is changed from an opened form (touching the bottom only) to a closed form (touching both top and bottom).