Vincent Hennebert wrote:
I doubt you will find any free font with both large Unicode support and several variants. You might want to give a try to FreeFont (http://www.nongnu.org/freefont/), which have a fairly reasonable support of Unicode, although not identical among the variants. I guess you can find commercial fonts, too.
Putting it side by side with Arial Unicode, it only lacks one or two scripts (for one given test page.) Funny how Arial Unicode is some 10 times bigger in file size, and yet only includes one typeface and one variant, whereas FreeFont includes three typefaces and all four variants for each...
(I wonder why Arial Unicode is so big, actually... maybe it contains explicit bitmap versions of the font for smaller sizes, to make the characters look more crisp. I noticed that FreeFont looked blurry even at size 8.)
Unfortunately though, the licence makes it as easy to distribute as Arial Unicode... except for people lucky enough to be working on an application which is already GPL.
Otherwise it should be rather easy to build a large Unicode support from several different fonts, each one supporting some given subset (say, a latin one, a cyrillic, a japanese, etc.). If you stick to Times-like shapes you should end up with a not too non-uniform set.
Yeah, I was thinking if I could pre-process the FO I could insert heaps of <fo:inline> elements to automatically change the font for each fragment to one which supports all the characters in the fragment.
Actually both the PDF renderer and the Java2D one do the same thing, that is fall back to default fonts. It's just that for PDF those default fonts are the well-known base 14 fonts, which support only a limited subset of Unicode (the latin range, basically). For Java2D those are the Lucida fonts with a larger range of glyphs.
Java also has a configured list of fonts to use for different languages, although I've never been sure whether those were also used for fallback.
This does bring up a thought though... the JDK ships with the Lucida fonts so we could potentially use those instead of Arial and we then wouldn't need to ship with anything. The only drawback would be that Lucida looks slightly (but only slightly) worse than Arial.
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