Is there a Unicode font for Windows available that is as complete as Arial Unicode MS, but free, even for commercial use?

Question

I have to distribute a legacy application for Windows that unfortunately does not support Font Linking, but is supposed to support many language cultures, including all east Asian languages. The perfect font for that purpose would be to use Unicode MS, which is part of Microsoft Office, which is not part of my target systems. So I would have to obain a license for Arial Unicode, which is currently no option.

So I am looking for a free Unicode font, that covers the same range that Arial Unicode MS does, but which may be freely distributed, even in a closed-sorce commercial project. Is there any such font available at all?

Solution 1

The Code2000 font has almost full coverage of the Basic Multilingual Plane (much larger than that of Arial Unicode MS, though perhaps without some of its characters in its modern versions). It is available e.g. from http://www.alanwood.net/downloads/. However, there are several issues with it:

• Its status is unclear. It used to be shareware, with a registration fee of $5 or so, but the author’s web site is down, and it is not clear whether it was he who made the font available at SourceForge as freeware.
• It’s a serif font, which might not suit your overall visual design.
• It’s not typographically ambitious (to put it diplomatically).
• It has been designed to work with font smoothing and may look like crap without it (not much of a problem these days I guess).

Yet, it seems to best match the description. There are many other fonts that might be considered, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode_font#List_of_Unicode_fonts, but they have more serious drawbacks for most uses (e.g., monospace design or bitmap format or limited character repertoire).

Solution 2

Found this question when I was looking for info about the distributability of the Android CJK fonts.

Assuming the answer there is correct about the licensing terms, then I think the Droid fonts might be a good answer for this question.

Keep in mind though - there can't ever be a single font that covers all east Asian languages accurately since a lot of code points are shared between the languages, yet speakers of each language write some of them a little differently.

Droid Sans Fallback has an especially broad spread of east Asian codepoints and according this page, appears to use Chinese for the unified code points that clash.

In addition, Google is also working on an entire font family called Noto intended to "support all the world’s languages". Of course, that's a whole family of fonts, not just a single font.

Solution 3

The Deja Vu collection of fonts cover numerous code points, and are licensed under a very permissive license. (IANAL) Not sure what its coverage of East Asian languages are, but there are some other fonts out there for that. In particular, Unifont's Font Guide may be helpful.

I'd also do a Google search, as there are many many more choices out there.

Be sure to check the licenses of anything you decide to use.

Last, why not just use the fonts on the system itself? If it's a Windows application, then the user should have Arial Unicode installed. (Or is this what you mean by, "does not support Font Linking"?)

Comments

[mdahlman]

Deja Vu isn't so great for Asian languages. It's included with JasperReports, and it's great... but the lack of CJK support is a bummer.

[ClairelyClaire]

For anyone looking for the DejaVu collection, it's now here: dejavu-fonts.github.io