Ask HN: Unified font file for all languages?

[seibelj]

I'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 / TTF that has unicode characters from all languages.

The Google Noto Font (https://www.google.com/get/noto/) supports all languages, but they aren't unified. They use separate TTF's for Chinese, for Korean, etc. I'm looking into how to unify them, but my question is, why isn't this an obvious problem that people have solved? Wouldn't game developers need unified fonts regularly? I haven't seen any common font that solves this issue and I'm perplexed.

[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...

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

[eschutte2]

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

[seibelj → eschutte2]

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.

[naikrovek]

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