Arial Unicode
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typography Typography is the art and technique of arranging type to make written language legible, readable and appealing when displayed. The arrangement of type involves selecting typefaces, point sizes, line lengths, line-spacing ( leading), ...
, the
TrueType TrueType is an outline font standard developed by Apple in the late 1980s as a competitor to Adobe's Type 1 fonts used in PostScript. It has become the most common format for fonts on the classic Mac OS, macOS, and Microsoft Windows operating ...
font Arial Unicode MS is an extended version of the font
Arial Arial (also called Arial MT) is a sans-serif typeface and set of computer fonts in the neo-grotesque style. Fonts from the Arial family are included with all versions of Microsoft Windows from Windows 3.1 on, some other Microsoft software ap ...
. Compared to Arial, it includes higher line height, omits kerning pairs and adds enough glyphs to cover a large subset of
Unicode Unicode, formally The Unicode Standard,The formal version reference is is an information technology standard for the consistent encoding, representation, and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems. The standard, wh ...
2.1—thus supporting most
Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational technology corporation producing computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at the Microsoft Redmond campus located in Redmond, Washin ...
code pages, but also requiring much more storage space (22 megabytes). It also adds
Ideographic An ideogram or ideograph (from Greek "idea" and "to write") is a graphic symbol that represents an idea or concept, independent of any particular language, and specific words or phrases. Some ideograms are comprehensible only by familiari ...
layout tables, but unlike Arial, it mandates no
smoothing In statistics and image processing, to smooth a data set is to create an approximating function that attempts to capture important patterns in the data, while leaving out noise or other fine-scale structures/rapid phenomena. In smoothing, the dat ...
in the 14–18 point range, and contains Roman (upright) glyphs only; there is no oblique ( italic) version. Arial Unicode MS was previously distributed with
Microsoft Office Microsoft Office, or simply Office, is the former name of a family of client software, server software, and services developed by Microsoft. It was first announced by Bill Gates on August 1, 1988, at COMDEX in Las Vegas. Initially a marketi ...
, but this ended in 2016 version. It is bundled with
Mac OS X v10.5 Mac OS X Leopard (version 10.5) is the sixth major release of macOS, Apple's desktop and server operating system for Macintosh computers. Leopard was released on October 26, 2007 as the successor of Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger, and is available in t ...
and later. It may also be purchased separately (as ''Arial Unicode'') from Ascender Corporation, who licenses the font from Microsoft. When rendered with the same engine and without making adjustments for the different font metrics, the glyphs that appear in both Arial and Arial Unicode MS appear to be slightly wider, and thus rounder, in Arial Unicode MS. Horizontal text may also appear to have more inter-line spacing in Arial Unicode MS. This is due to larger bounding boxes (Arial Unicode MS needs more room for some of its extended glyphs) and the limitations of renderers, not changes in the glyph shapes. The lack of kerning pairs in Arial Unicode MS may also affect inter-glyph spacing in some renderers (for example the Adobe Flash Player). Arial Unicode MS also includes
Hebrew Hebrew (; ; ) is a Northwest Semitic language of the Afroasiatic language family. Historically, it is one of the spoken languages of the Israelites and their longest-surviving descendants, the Jews and Samaritans. It was largely preserved ...
glyphs different from the Hebrew glyphs found in Arial. They are based on the shapes of the Hebrew glyphs in Tahoma, but are adjusted to the weight, proportions and style of Arial.


History and availability

Arial was designed by Robin Nicholas and Patricia Saunders in 1982 and was released as TrueType font in 1990. From 1993 to 1999, it was extended as Arial Unicode MS (with its first release as a TrueType font in 1998) by the following members of Monotype Typography's Monotype Type Drawing Office, under contract to Microsoft: Brian Allen, Evert Bloemsma, Jelle Bosma, Joshua Hadley, Wallace Ho, Kamal Mansour, Steve Matteson, and Thomas Rickner. From mid-2001 through mid-2002, Arial Unicode MS was also available as a separate download for licensed users of the standalone version of
Microsoft Publisher Microsoft Publisher is a desktop publishing application from Microsoft, differing from Microsoft Word in that the emphasis is placed on page layout and graphic design rather than text composition and proofreading. Overview Publisher is includ ...
2000 SR-1, which did not ship with the font. The freely downloadable version was withdrawn after Microsoft Publisher 2002, which included the font, began shipping. The withdrawal coincided with the withdrawal of the free downloads of Microsoft's "
Core fonts for the Web Core fonts for the Web was a project started by Microsoft in 1996 to create a standard pack of fonts for the World Wide Web. It included the proprietary fonts Andalé Mono, Arial, Arial Black, Comic Sans MS, Courier New, Georgia, Impact, Times Ne ...
". Numerous companies, organizations, educational establishments and even governments were directing users to the download without referencing the need for a valid Publisher or Office license or any Microsoft operating system. Monotype Imaging still owns the Arial and Arial Unicode MS trademarks, but Microsoft once retained exclusive licensing rights to the fonts. On 11 April 2005, Ascender Corporation announced it had entered an agreement with Microsoft which enables Ascender to distribute Microsoft fonts, including the Windows Core Fonts, the Microsoft Web Fonts and the many multilingual fonts currently supplied by Microsoft. Called ''Arial Unicode'', it is sold for approximately $99 per 5 users. The font is also apparently licensed to
Apple An apple is an edible fruit produced by an apple tree (''Malus domestica''). Apple trees are cultivated worldwide and are the most widely grown species in the genus ''Malus''. The tree originated in Central Asia, where its wild ancestor, ' ...
, who announced on October 16, 2007 that their flagship operating system,
Mac OS X v10.5 Mac OS X Leopard (version 10.5) is the sixth major release of macOS, Apple's desktop and server operating system for Macintosh computers. Leopard was released on October 26, 2007 as the successor of Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger, and is available in t ...
("Leopard"), would be bundled with Arial Unicode. Leopard also ships with several other previously Microsoft-only fonts, including
Microsoft Sans Serif Microsoft Sans Serif is a TrueType font introduced with early Windows versions. It is the successor of MS Sans Serif (formerly Helv), a proportional bitmap font introduced in Windows 1.0. Both fonts are very similar in design to Arial and Helvet ...
, Tahoma and
Wingdings Wingdings is a series of dingbat fonts that render letters as a variety of symbols. They were originally developed in 1990 by Microsoft by combining glyphs from Lucida Icons, Arrows, and Stars licensed from Charles Bigelow and Kris Holmes. Ce ...
. Monotype Imaging currently also licenses Arial Unicode on its own. It was also bundled by Monotype as part of iPhone Compatibility Font Set. Arial Unicode MS is no longer available in Microsoft Office 2016, as it has been judged to no longer be suitable as a fallback font.


Versions

Version 0.84 was supplied with Microsoft Office 2000 and the standalone versions of that suite's applications—except Publisher 2000 SR-1. It includes 51,180 glyphs (38,911 characters), supports 32 code pages, and contains Latin and Han Ideographic
OpenType OpenType is a format for scalable computer fonts. It was built on its predecessor TrueType, retaining TrueType's basic structure and adding many intricate data structures for prescribing typographic behavior. OpenType is a registered trademark ...
layout tables. The code pages supported are 1250 (Latin 2: East Europe), 1251 (Cyrillic), 1252 (Latin 1), 1253 (Greek),
1254 Year 1254 ( MCCLIV) was a common year starting on Thursday (link will display the full calendar) of the Julian calendar. Events By place Byzantine Empire * Battle of Adrianople: Byzantine forces under Emperor Theodore II (Laskaris) d ...
(Turkish), 1255 (Hebrew),
1256 Year 1256 ( MCCLVI) was a leap year starting on Saturday (link will display the full calendar) of the Julian calendar. Events By place Mongol Empire * Spring – Mongol forces (some 80,000 men) under Hulagu Khan cross the Oxus Ri ...
(Arabic),
1257 Year 1257 ( MCCLVII) was a common year starting on Monday (link will display the full calendar) of the Julian calendar. Events By place Europe * Spring – The Epirote–Nicaean conflict begins between the Despotate of Epirus and ...
(Windows Baltic), Code page 1258 (Vietnamese), 437 (US), 708 (Arabic; ASMO 708), 737 (Greek), 775 (MS-DOS Baltic),
850 ''For codepage, see CP850.'' __NOTOC__ Year 850 ( DCCCL) was a common year starting on Wednesday (link will display the full calendar) of the Julian calendar. Events By place Europe * February 1 – King Ramiro I dies in his palac ...
(WE/Latin 1), 852 (Latin 2), 855 (IBM Cyrillic; primarily Russian),
857 __NOTOC__ Year 857 ( DCCCLVII) was a common year starting on Friday (link will display the full calendar) of the Julian calendar. Events By place Byzantine Empire * Emperor Michael III, under the influence of his uncle Bardas, banis ...
(MS-DOS IBM Turkish), 860 (MS-DOS Portuguese),
861 __NOTOC__ Year 861 ( DCCCLXI) was a common year starting on Wednesday (link will display the full calendar) of the Julian calendar. Events By place Europe * March – Robert the Strong is appointed margrave of Neustria by King Ch ...
(MS-DOS Icelandic), 862 (Hebrew), 863 (MS-DOS Canadian French),
864 __NOTOC__ Year 864 ( DCCCLXIV) was a leap year starting on Saturday (link will display the full calendar) of the Julian calendar. Events By place Europe * Spring – Emperor Louis II (the Younger) marches with a Frankish army ag ...
(Arabic),
865 __NOTOC__ Year 865 ( DCCCLXV) was a common year starting on Monday (link will display the full calendar) of the Julian calendar. Events By place Europe * King Louis the German divides the East Frankish Kingdom among his three sons. C ...
(MS-DOS Nordic), 866 (MS-DOS Russian), 869 (IBM Greek),
874 __FORCETOC__ Year 874 ( DCCCLXXIV) was a common year starting on Friday (link will display the full calendar) of the Julian calendar. Events By place Europe * Salomon, duke ('king') of Brittany, is murdered by a faction which includ ...
(Thai),
932 Year 932 ( CMXXXII) was a leap year starting on Sunday (link will display the full calendar) of the Julian calendar. Events By place Europe * Summer – Alberic II leads an uprising at Rome against his stepfather Hugh of Provence ...
(ShiftJIS/Japan),
936 Year 936 ( CMXXXVI) was a leap year starting on Friday (link will display the full calendar) of the Julian calendar. Events By place Europe * June 19 – At Laon, Louis IV, the 14-year old son of the late King Charles the Simp ...
(Chinese: Simplified), 949 (Korean Wansung),
950 Year 950 ( CML) was a common year starting on Tuesday (link will display the full calendar) of the Julian calendar. Events By place Byzantine Empire * Arab–Byzantine War: A Hamdanid army (30,000 men) led by Sayf al-Dawla raids int ...
(Chinese: Traditional), " Macintosh Character Set" (US Roman), and "
Windows OEM Character Set Windows code pages are sets of characters or code pages (known as character encodings in other operating systems) used in Microsoft Windows from the 1980s and 1990s. Windows code pages were gradually superseded when Unicode was implemented in Wi ...
". It covers all code points containing non-control characters in Unicode 2.0 and allows only preview and print embedding. Version 0.86 has the same coverage and support as 0.84. Versions 1.00 and 1.01 were supplied with Microsoft Office 2002 (Microsoft Office XP), Microsoft Office 2003 and the standalone versions of those suites' applications. It includes 50,377 glyphs (38,917 characters), which reduces Combining Diacritical Marks to 72, increases Miscellaneous Technical characters to 123, increases Private Use Area characters to 43, reduces Spacing Modifier Letters to 57. Code page 1361 (Korean Johab) was added. It adds layout tables for Devanagari, Gujarati, Gurmukhi, Kana (Hiragana & Katakana), Kannada, and Tamil. Its Han Ideographic tables were updated to support vertical writing. It covers all code points containing non-control characters in Unicode 2.1 and allows editable embedding.


Bugs

All versions of Arial Unicode MS deal with double-width diacritic characters incorrectly, drawing them too far to the left by one character width. According to th
Unicode Standard 4.0.0, section 7.7
combining double diacritics go between the two characters to be marked. However, to make text look correct in Arial Unicode MS, the double-width diacritic must be placed after both characters to be marked. This means that it is not possible to make text that renders these characters correctly in both Arial Unicode MS and in other (correctly designed) Unicode fonts. This bug affects the rendering of text written in the
International Phonetic Alphabet The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is an alphabetic system of phonetic notation based primarily on the Latin script. It was devised by the International Phonetic Association in the late 19th century as a standardized representation ...
and in
ALA-LC Romanization ALA-LC (American Library AssociationLibrary of Congress) is a set of standards for romanization, the representation of text in other writing systems using the Latin script. Applications The system is used to represent bibliographic information by ...
for non-Latin-script languages. If the displayed font in your browser draws the diacritics correctly, they should appear over the characters: k͠p, k͡p. The minuscule letters that form the ligatures fi, fl, ffi, ffl, long st, and st are not connected, except for the two f's in the ffi and ffl ligatures. As there is no semantic difference, nothing mandates that these must be connected, and they are indistinguishable from the individual letters placed next to each other. Arial Unicode MS was unable to render some
Arabic Arabic (, ' ; , ' or ) is a Semitic language spoken primarily across the Arab world.Semitic languages: an international handbook / edited by Stefan Weninger; in collaboration with Geoffrey Khan, Michael P. Streck, Janet C. E.Watson; Walter ...
characters, particularly those used in Sindhi, in their connected forms, showing only their isolated forms instead.


Arial Unicode Bold (2011)

On December 14, 2011, Monotype Imaging Holdings Inc. announced the release of Arial Unicode Bold, under the name Arial Unicode MS Bold.Monotype Imaging Releases the Arial Unicode Bold Typeface
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See also

* Other well-known fonts with Unicode coverage include: ** Bitstream Cyberbit **
TITUS Cyberbit Basic ''Bitstream Cyberbit'' is a commercial serif Unicode font designed by Bitstream Inc. It is freeware for non-commercial uses. It was one of the first widely available fonts to support a large portion of the Unicode repertoire. Cyberbit was devel ...
**
Code2000 Code2000 is a serif and pan- Unicode digital font, which includes characters and symbols from a very large range of writing systems. As of the current final version 1.171 released in 2008, Code2000 is designed and implemented by James Kass t ...
**
Doulos SIL Doulos SIL (Ancient Greek for "slave") is a serif typeface developed by SIL International, very similar to Times or Times New Roman. Unlike Times New Roman, Doulos only has a single face, Regular. The goal of its design according to the SIL In ...
** Lucida Sans Unicode *
Free software Unicode typefaces There are Unicode typefaces which are open-source and designed to contain glyphs of all Unicode characters, or at least a broad selection of Unicode scripts. There are also numerous projects aimed at providing only a certain script, such as the ...
* Unicode fonts


References


External links

* Font catalog entries: *
Microsoft typography: Arial Unicode MS
*
Ascender Corporation: Arial Unicode Font
(archived site) *
Monotype Imaging: Arial UnicodeAgfa Monotype Unicode Font In Windows 2000Arial Unicode MS for digital fonts
{{DEFAULTSORT:Arial Unicode Ms Microsoft typefaces Unicode typefaces Typefaces and fonts introduced in 1993 Neo-grotesque sans-serif typefaces IPA typefaces