On Dec 6, 2004, at 10:23 AM, Johannes Bergerhausen wrote:
From some discussions here i learned that Arial Unicode MS contains about 50.000 glyphs,The TrueType and OpenType font formats do not allow a font to contain more than about 65,000 glyphs. Since there are well over 65,000 characters in Unicode, plus additional glyphic forms that would be necessary for proper support for various scripts, it is no longer possible to produce a single font like Arial Unicode MS.
which is about the size of characters encoded in Unicode 2.0 and was shipped the last
time bundled with Office for Windows 2003.
A Pan-Unicode-Font is a beautiful idea.
Why Microsoft/Monotype stopped the developpement of further versions?
There are other issues -- making a single typeface which covers all the scripts in Unicode and has a common esthetic design is really not possible; loading a huge font can consume a significant chunk of the resources on a system, most of which is wasted; and so on.
