I'd like to use this opportunity to share some recent artwork from Type Development at Adobe Systems. This is a thumbnail of a Kazuraki poster that was designed for an internal Tech Fair that will take place during the coming week. Kazuraki is genuinely proportional Japanese font that is based on the writings of Fujiwara-no-Teika, and designed by Adobe's own Ryoko Nishizuka. This poster was also designed by the font's designer. (Click on it to see a larger version.)
Every so often I get a request (either from within or outside Adobe) for a "Unicode font." Unfortunately, that term is not very meaningful to me. The obvious interpretations are:
1) To me as a font geek, the phrase "a Unicode font" "logically" means "a font with a unicode encoding (cmap table)." That would be pretty much every one of the 2400+ OpenType fonts Adobe has in our type library. So that interpretation doesn't really narrow things much.
2) They could mean "a font that covers all of Unicode." However, Unicode today has over 100,000 defined code points, and as there is no font format that can include more than 65,535 glyphs, such a font is not technically possible. (There's a separate question as to whether it would be desirable - see below.)
3) They could also mean "a font that covers some useful subset of Unicode that is more than just the basic WinANSI or MacRoman 8-byte (256-character) set." However, for that to be meaningful, they'd have to define exactly what writing systems or languages are important to them.
