font for all international characters

[enemem]

Hi everyone,

I'm looking for a single font that can display all the international characters from the standard ASCII character table (so all the funny letters in european + eastern european languages).

Best if it doesn't look too technical/ugly too

So - please get your thinking caps on and help me out here! I know that there are lots of people from all over the world here, so something should come up!

Thanks for the help - n.

[tone001]

Well most 'proper' fonts should have all of these characters as standard .... Verdana, Arial, Tahoma (any of the MS fonts) ... or any of the fonts like Frutiger, Futura ... its only really the over-the-top, not good for text areas, display fonts that don't have full font definitions.

If you want more groovy examples http://www.chank.com does fonts with full definitions.

[enemem]

Thanks for that tone!

Unfortunately the 'standard' fonts don't produce all the letters, including fonts like Arial, Verdana, Frutiger. They all fail on characters like the Spanish n with the squiggle on top (ascii 164/165) and the Skandinavian (Danish?) a with the circle on top (134/143) - maybe some others too but these are the ones I have tried against...

We are doing this for a language learning website and would like to use the same swf for all languages, simply plugging in the text from a database. But this does mean that I need a font for the text field which will cope with all the different characters.

That's the status at the moment - no luck yet. I'll keep searching but any suggestions to solve/work around this problem would be appreciated.

thanks again - n.

[tone001]

Hmmm.... if they don't have them in its HUGELY unlikely that any others will ...

You can get like 20 versions of Arial with all the different character supports in ... Arial Turkish for example ...

Of course Unicode Arial will have them all in, but Flash can'r embed Unicode fonts ... (and even if it could Unicode fonts are huge!)

Have you considered creating your own font in Fontographer??

[enemem]

yeah - we have masses of different language encodings for masses of fonts - the problem is that it would be great to have one single font which could do everything together.

I seem to be getting somewhere, still a bit confused about character sets, like Latin 1, Latin Extended A/B etc. Will have to do some experimentation. I think some fonts (maybe even the ones you listed) do have these characters but only in an extended character set which may or may not be accessible in flash. I'm not a font expert, so I don't really understand all the ins and outs of the technology.

As to creating fonts by hand - well, it did cross my mind but maybe more of a last resort because it would be very time consuming and take lots of planning to get it right...

Anyway - thanks for your input - any more ideas greatly appreciated.

cheers -n .