Arial Unicode MS Font

Adrian Brain

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Dec 11, 2002, 6:51:32 AM12/11/02

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When I am working with Japanese language text in InDesign, I use the font Arial Unicode MS, but although I can make this font type bold in all other software packages to differentiate pieces of text apart, I cannot do this in InDesign.
Can anyone advise me on how to make the font Arial Unicode MS bold, so as I can differentiate it from other 'normal' text?

Harron K. Appleman

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Dec 11, 2002, 12:03:47 PM12/11/02

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Adrian,

See my reply to you in the other thread.

Arial Unicode MS is a single font. The "other software packages" you refer to -- probably word processors -- undoubtedly have the ability to create faux bold.

If you're able to change type weight in ID, that's because those weights exist as individual fonts within a type family.

=-= Harron =-=

Dominic Hurley

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Dec 11, 2002, 7:06:32 PM12/11/02

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Arial regular is a single font, but the bold, italic, and bold italic versions of this OpenType font also exist and are supplied with Windows (they have the filenames arialbd.ttf, airali.ttf, arialbi.ttf). Check that you have these fonts installed.

Thomas Phinney

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Dec 11, 2002, 9:04:20 PM12/11/02

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However, Arial Unicode MS is a different font, which has a vastly larger character set than regular Arial, does *not* have bold or italic fonts.

If the character needed is in both fonts, one could of course change to regular Arial for the bold stuff.

T

Dominic Hurley

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Dec 11, 2002, 9:40:41 PM12/11/02

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Ah, thanks for that. I didn't realise there were two OpenType versions of Arial. One has always been one more than enough for me!

Adrian Brain

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Dec 12, 2002, 5:28:31 AM12/12/02

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In reply to Thomas's comments about changing to regular Arial where both bold and regular characters are required. How can I change the typeface to Arial bold whilst maintaining the Japanese text?

Peter Kahrel

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Dec 12, 2002, 11:32:58 AM12/12/02

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Mike,

It is such a big monster because it has the full (or almost full) Unicode character set in it. I don't think there's any wisdom in such fonts--they can be useful only to people producing books with titles like "All the characters of the world", of which there aren't many... Well, there's "Writing systems of the World", true.

Peter

Mike Witherell

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Dec 12, 2002, 11:09:56 AM12/12/02

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Hey Thomas Phinney,

Why is Arial Unicode (arialuni.ttf) so large in comparison with other fonts in my fonts list? My computer informs me that it is 22,730 Kb while other font files are around 133 Kb or so. Yikes! What is that monster and when did it show up in my fonts? I don't recall explicitly installing it. Any tidbits of wisdom?

Thanks,

Mike Witherell in Washington D.C.

Richard Rönnbäck

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Dec 12, 2002, 1:12:24 PM12/12/02

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Arial Unicode may be large, but it is also very, very useful to all people
who have to communicate in languages other than English, that is the vast
majority of the World...

Imagine an international company that has to deal with something like 40
different languages in perhaps twice as many countries and ensure consist
look and be absolutely sure that the information is correctly displayed.

Add to that the easy maintenance of that company's tens of thousands of
computers in hundreds of offices...

Or, if you have a name like mine (or for that matter, like names of half the
worlds population) then you also appreciate that it is transferred and
displayed correctly, rather than being totally messed up somewhere along the
way...

In other words:

Viva Unicode!

Richard Rönnbäck, Adobe Systems Nordic

Peter Kahrel

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Dec 12, 2002, 6:04:40 PM12/12/02

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Richard,

Viva Unicode indeed. I'm a big fan of Unicode. But I don't see why all those symbols/characters should be in one font file. It makes sense to put into one file those characters that need to be mixed, such as maths and phonetics with 'standard' roman type, because you can't kern across font files. Greek, Cyrillic, Hindi, etc., can just as happily sit in different files since these scripts are not mixed.

The use of Unicode is that all characters are assigned a code that is standardized across platforms--that all those characters should be in one file does not follow.

Peter

Harron K. Appleman

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Dec 12, 2002, 6:10:03 PM12/12/02

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Peter,

There are Unicode subset fonts... just not a lot of them. For example, Bitstream Cyberbit is a huge font file, but if you want only the Asian characters, you can get Cyberbit CJK.

Similarly, MS Mincho and MS Gothic are Japanese fonts that conform to Unicode encoding.

One can hope there will be more in time, especially because OpenType is based on Unicode encoding.

=-= Harron =-=

pleader

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Dec 13, 2002, 4:02:47 AM12/13/02

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Arial Unicode MS is meant to be a "catch-all" font. Naturally there will be compromises. Kerning is not a big hit, and some of the characters would not pass muster if compared to a special language subset font, e.g. Chinese.

Arial Unicode MS is not really meant for professional typography for the more esoteric languages, but as a display font it's an absolute workhorse.

Regards,
Victor Lee.

Thomas Phinney

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Dec 13, 2002, 5:07:45 PM12/13/02

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Like Victor said.

One good use I can think of is when you're storing a whole bunch of text of various unknown sources/languages in a database, and you want to be able to display and print it. The same field using different languages.

T