Complete list of charecters in order?

[dezcom]

You can be assured that all of the Glyphs in Andreas and John's fonts are of the highest quality.

[John Hudson]

Except the interrobang. I make no guarantees for the quality of any interrobang.

[dezcom]

Bang! Zoom! Alice ;-)

[brianskywalker]

This is related, has there ever been a competent attempt at a font that contains the entire unicode standard in a relatively consistent style (where possible)?

[charles_e]

Does anyone have opinions of Quiria

Yes. I dowloaded it this afternoon.

It's like a bad Times Roman.

Trashed it this afternoon, too.

Well, you asked...

[Igor Freiberger]

Although far from the excellence of Andreas' and John's works, this font project sums to 6,416 glyphs covering the whole Latin, Cyrillic and Greek scripts (sorry, I made no updates in that thread for a while as I am 'out of type business' until the end of 2012).

The font should be available at some point of 2013. I uploaded a little sample (in two parts, here and here) and a not very good presentation here.

About other fonts, Quivira is just one of these Times-based adaptations, with no enough quality. DejaVu is better, but if you want a free one to build a character list, Gentium Plus is the best choice I know.

[Andreas Stötzner]

> a competent attempt at a font that contains the entire unicode standard in a relatively consistent style

Well, that very idea was actually the starting point of Andron (11 years ago), theoretically. The style had to be not only consistent but also rather classical, so that the font is suitable for large-scale scientific editing. “The entire unicode standard” is of course not feasible for one man in ten or twenty years. 90% of “the entire unicode standard” is Chinese, there you have the problem.

But there are other challenges beyond Chinese, which cannot be mastered by one alone. Above all, the vast range of Indian and Asian scripts. Many of them are highly sophisticated (as Latin or Chinese or Arabic, for instance), so you just can’t step in and make the glyphs of it, having no related background at all.

The classical type styles of many scripts seem to have some underlying common characteristic principles, which derive from the pen (or the brush). Latin, Arabic, Devanagari, Chinese … have their own respective ductus, but all those ductūs have more or less something in common. Would be worthwhile to explore how far you can go in “harmonizing” all that.
I’d love to study Tibetan, Devanagari, Arabic and Korean (and Chinese) for a while, and than start with Latin and Greek from point zero again … But for that I’d have to get imprisoned first, I suppose.

A world writing camp would be great, where masters from all scripts tutor the crowd how to hold the pen.

[hrant]

To me the "secret" to multi-script harmonization* lies
in the proper relative use of the Cartesian space, where
apparent size has to be balanced against the natural
bouma-formation needs of the given script. For example,
how to "translate" Latin's dominant x-height into other
scripts. Imposing the x-height on Arabic for example is
so hopeless that people have the sense to quickly give up,
but this undesirability is also true -just more subtle- in
the case of pretty much any other script, like Greek,
Cyrillic or Armenian. Human consciousness likes to line
things up; but our reading mechanism has deeper needs.

* At least for a text face.

In contrast, whether one uses geometry, chirography or
the "third way" (or some combination) in constructing the
"strokes" merely imparts an overall consistent style (which
to me is a more superficial/easy matter).

hhp

[brianskywalker]

What if the project was not done by one man but many who have expertise in the various languages?

[hrant]

Sure, but they would have to agree on a basic philosophy.
Or have a tough boss. I've long admired benign monarchies. :-)

hhp

[Andreas Stötzner]

> What if the project was not done by one man but many who have expertise in the various languages?

– or rather: various scripts.
Yes, that might be the way to go.
I doubt if a ‘tough boss’ would be enough. Subtle skills and feeling would be required from all participants. And the ability to adjust …

[John Hudson]

The 'tough boss' approach seems to me counter productive if the whole point of involving multiple people is to overcome the difficulty of one person being able to master all the knowledge and skills necessary to designing for all the scripts. I've spent the last two years working with a team of six other people on a set of fonts supporting nine different Indian scripts, and it would have been pointless -- no matter how benign my monarchy -- having me lay down the law on how it should be done. We planned carefully. We analysed the client needs and target use environments in depth (the fact that the client then went and changed the environment after we'd done 95% of the work isn't our fault!). We researched options for the individual scripts, looking for ways to harmonise them to each other and to an existing Latin type that were in accordance with the individual writing and/or typographic traditions . We documented those technical issues that would inevitably force us to deviate from those traditions (notably, the difficulty of producing traditional bold designs for southern Indian scripts in an asymmetric rendering environment). We produced trial forms and tested them before proceeding to the main body of design work. And we discussed, discussed, discussed.

[hrant]

The ideal boss in this case wouldn't try to master
any of the individual scripts; he would make sure
those with mastery in a script engage in the right
attitude with respect to the others, and the whole.
It sounds like what you did actually. The best boss
is always a very good listener. But sometimes he
will have to say: "No, we need to do it this way."

For example he might guide the use of linguistic
frequency data in the determination of the ideal
vertical proportions* even if an individual in the
team does not believe in that sort of thing.

* http://themicrofoundry.com/ss_rome1.html
(Rightmost image)

hhp

[Ryan Maelhorn]

I'd be quite interested to see some of the more exotic glyphs with a nice fat bold Helvetica feel to them. Is that even possible? Can you produce a "sans serif" FLOBT version of the middle eastern scripts?

[brianskywalker]

So likely the idea of a font comprising the entire unicode standard in a unified style would be something very difficult to produce. This is quite disappointing. Many of the languages are similar enough to Latin, or are sub-Latin, where one designer can cover it, as is the case with Andron. It becomes a problem when you get into more "exotic" languages, I think. I'm guessing one could make less work from the CJK symbols by breaking the glyphs into a couple hundred main components and building the glyphs from there, although it seems that even still there would have to be adjustments to every glyph, since the stroke weights seem to vary greatly in order to achieve more unity in appearance between the complicated and simple glyphs.

[Theunis de Jong]

Brian, typography as you know it is very Western (= Latin) biased. "Italics", for instance, has no real counterpart in a lot of "exotic" fonts. (I was surprised to find an Arabic Italic font with the latest InDesign -- I darenot vouch for its currency among arabists.)

A lot of CJK fonts *do* contain building blocks for more complicated glyphs. Then again, portions of Chinese characters, for example, lend themselves to this because of their natural design. I.e. if there were a script with just horizontal and vertical lines, a designer could just design one horizontal and one vertical line and then let software search things out.

[Thomas Phinney]

"I can't think of a "regular" font that literally has thousands of glyphs."

A number have been cited. Pretty much all of Adobe's typefaces of recent years have 3000+ glyphs per font.

[Theunis de Jong]

For the regular sort of typesetting I'm doing every day, I'm happy to even find a Greek set included when I need it ;-)

Minion Pro is my staple font -- wait, its Regular already has 1669 glyphs! (Plus a couple more white-space-onlies.)

"per font" -- do you mean per complete font set? Since Minion comes in three weights and two styles, for the entire font that adds up to about 6 * 1669 ≈ 10,000 glyphs. Not Even Including Swashes.

[Thomas Phinney]

No, I meant per font. So yes, 10,000 glyphs for Minion, not including optical size variants. Throw those in and you get 40,000 glyphs.

My own Hypatia Sans (on which I had lots of help): 3,000+ glyphs x 12 fonts = ~36,000 glyphs

T