Font choices in International scenarios: multilingual vs unicode

Posted by TravisO on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by TravisO
Published on 2008-12-17T21:25:18Z Indexed on 2010/04/10 21:53 UTC
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Filed under:

fonts

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internationalization

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multilingual

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unicode

I have a website that will eventually display multiple languages. I notice the common fonts used in web CSS (ex: Arial, Verdana, Times New Roman, Tahoma) and even the newer Vista/Office 2007/VS2008 fonts (Calibri,Cambria, Candara, Corbel, etc) are significantly larger (~350K) than your average (US only?) TTF font (~50k) so these fonts contain most/all the major character sets that common languages (Spanish, French, German, etc) use.

My question is, would somebody confirm that these fonts listed above are acceptable for international use of the major (let's say top 8) spoken languages? If so, then I'm guessing the only purpose of unicode fonts; such "Arial Unicode" (a massive 22mb) is only for dealing with extremely niche dialog, eastern glyphs (Chinese, Japanese) and dead languages?

I'm just looking for some confirmation from developers that have their desktop apps/web apps rendering multiple languages and have a visual confirmation, I'm already in the 99% sure bin but you know what they say about assumption.

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