
Ask HN: Unified font file for all languages? - seibelj
I&#x27;m writing a game that makes heavy use of chat and GUI interfaces. The UI framework requires you to load a single font to display characters. Therefore, to support as many languages as possible, I would like to load an OTF &#x2F; TTF that has unicode characters from all languages.<p>The Google Noto Font (https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.google.com&#x2F;get&#x2F;noto&#x2F;) supports all languages, but they aren&#x27;t unified. They use separate TTF&#x27;s for Chinese, for Korean, etc. I&#x27;m looking into how to unify them, but my question is, why isn&#x27;t this an obvious problem that people have solved? Wouldn&#x27;t game developers need unified fonts regularly? I haven&#x27;t seen any common font that solves this issue and I&#x27;m perplexed.
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Jonnax
Just to point something out with Chinese and Japanese gliphs. There are quite
a few characters which share the same character but are represented
differently in Japanese and Chinese.

I think that prevents unification for a single font.

As an example check out the screenshots for this app that fixes the issue (of
Chinese gliphs being used in non-Japanese languages) by changing the priority
of fonts used on Android.
[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.ascendtv.k...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.ascendtv.kanjifix&hl=en)

Incidently that issue was resolved in Marshmallow or Nougat where you can
select secondary languages in the settings.

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eschutte2
TTF and OTF only support 2^16 glyphs per font. Why does the UI framework only
allow one font file?

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seibelj
I can dynamically change the font if I want, but only 1 font loaded at a time.
In this case, I would have to auto-detect which font to use based on the UTF8
code, and swap the font out.

Is this how big companies do it? For example, Supercell in the Clash of Clans
/ Clash Royale games will display text perfectly no matter what language.
Latin text will appear intermixed with Korean, Chinese, etc. without any
issue.

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naikrovek
GNU Unifont has what you want, except it is a bitmap font.

