Lucida Sans Unicode, which precedes Arial Unicode, designed by Charles Bigelow and Kris Holmes in 1993, contained a much smaller character set, supporting only Latin, Greek, Cyrillic and Hebrew, but it also explored the relationships between shapes of various scripts. In Arial Unicode, the Latin part is expressed in a low-contrast sans design, Armenian contains serifs, Devanagari is an upright design with high contrast, Tamil is slanted, and the Gurmukhi script is a monolinear design.Īs unsatisfactory as these choices are, perhaps it was even intentional, as Unicode explicitly is not concerned with design style encoded characters are just an abstract notion of shapes, with no implied appearance of glyphs, no difference in encoding between a sans, serif, or a script typeface. Arial Unicode (1998) is a collage of various fonts ‘glued’ together, without considering their proportions or purpose – just as the 18th-century printers showed little care about using various typefaces alongside each other. If Unicode and OpenType format meant that fonts could support any writing scripts within one file, what should those fonts look like? The first Unicode-compliant fonts didn’t seem to care too much about appearances. Unicode promotes an interconnected, globalised world, where people exchange messages across platforms. Yes, you could typeset different scripts before this, but it required various hacks and use of numerous fonts and encodings, resulting in documents that were not interchangeable. For the first time, Unicode allowed the coexistence of various writing scripts using the same fonts on the same page. Unicode, a standardising technology for the consistent encoding and representation of text across the world’s languages, was formally introduced in 1991, with the intention to cover all living and dead languages, and to create a foundation for processing, storage and interchange of text data in any language and software.
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