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In digital
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), an ...
, 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 In metal typesetting, a font is a particular size, weight and style of a typeface. Each font is a matched set of type, with a piece (a " sort") for each glyph. A typeface consists of a range of such fonts that shared an overall design. In mo ...
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 ...
. 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, ...
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, Washi ...
code page In computing, a code page is a character encoding and as such it is a specific association of a set of printable characters and control characters with unique numbers. Typically each number represents the binary value in a single byte. (In some c ...
s, but also requiring much more storage space (22
megabyte The megabyte is a multiple of the unit byte for digital information. Its recommended unit symbol is MB. The unit prefix ''mega'' is a multiplier of (106) in the International System of Units (SI). Therefore, one megabyte is one million bytes o ...
s). 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 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 marketin ...
, but this ended in 2016 version. It is bundled with Mac OS X v10.5 and later. It may also be purchased separately (as ''Arial Unicode'') from
Ascender Corporation Ascender Corporation was a digital typeface foundry and software development company located in the Chicago suburb of Elk Grove Village, Illinois in the United States. It was founded in 2004 by a team of software developers, typographers, and font ...
, who licenses the font from Microsoft. When rendered with the same engine and without making adjustments for the different font metrics, the
glyph A glyph () is any kind of purposeful mark. In typography, a glyph is "the specific shape, design, or representation of a character". It is a particular graphical representation, in a particular typeface, of an element of written language. A g ...
s 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 Monotype Imaging Holdings Inc., founded as Lanston Monotype Machine Company in 1887 in Philadelphia by Tolbert Lanston, is an American (historically Anglo-American) company that specializes in digital typesetting and typeface design for use with ...
'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 Ascender Corporation was a digital typeface foundry and software development company located in the Chicago suburb of Elk Grove Village, Illinois in the United States. It was founded in 2004 by a team of software developers, typographers, and font ...
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 ancest ...
, who announced on October 16, 2007 that their flagship operating system, Mac OS X v10.5 ("Leopard"), would be bundled with Arial Unicode. Leopard also ships with several other previously Microsoft-only fonts, including Microsoft Sans Serif, 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 A fallback font is a reserve typeface containing symbols for as many Unicode characters as possible. When a display system encounters a character that is not part of the repertoire of any of the other available fonts, a symbol from 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 Year 1252 ( MCCLII) was a leap year starting on Monday (link will display the full calendar) of the Julian calendar. Events By place Europe * April 6 – Saint Peter of Verona is assassinated by Carino of Balsamo. * May 15 – P ...
(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 Year 1255 ( MCCLV) was a common year starting on Friday (link will display the full calendar) of the Julian calendar. Events By place Europe * February 25 – Battle of Montebruno: Guelph forces under Thomas II of Savoy invade the ...
(Hebrew), 1256 (Arabic), 1257 (Windows Baltic), Code page 1258 (Vietnamese),
437 __NOTOC__ Year 437 ( CDXXXVII) was a common year starting on Friday (link will display the full calendar) of the Julian calendar. At the time, it was known as the Year of the Consulship of Aetius and Sigisvultus (or, less frequently, year 1190 ...
(US), 708 (Arabic; ASMO 708), 737 (Greek),
775 __NOTOC__ Year 775 ( DCCLXXV) was a common year starting on Sunday (link will display the full calendar) of the Julian calendar. The denomination 775 for this year has been used since the early medieval period, when the Anno Domini calendar era ...
(MS-DOS Baltic), 850 (WE/Latin 1),
852 __NOTOC__ Year 852 ( DCCCLII) was a leap year starting on Friday (link will display the full calendar) of the Julian calendar. Events By place Europe * March 4 – Trpimir I, duke ('' knez'') of Croatia, and founder of the Trpim ...
(Latin 2),
855 __NOTOC__ Year 855 ( DCCCLV) was a common year starting on Tuesday (link will display the full calendar) of the Julian calendar. Events By place Byzantine Empire * November 20 – Theoktistos, co-regent of the Empire on behalf of ...
(IBM Cyrillic; primarily Russian), 857 (MS-DOS IBM Turkish), 860 (MS-DOS Portuguese), 861 (MS-DOS Icelandic),
862 __NOTOC__ Year 862 ( DCCCLXII) was a common year starting on Thursday (link will display the full calendar) of the Julian calendar. Events By place Europe * The Varangians (called Rus'), under the leadership of Rurik, a Viking chiefta ...
(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 __NOTOC__ Year 866 ( DCCCLXVI) was a common year starting on Tuesday (link will display the full calendar) of the Julian calendar. Events By place Byzantine Empire * April 21 – Bardas, the regent of the Byzantine Empire, is murd ...
(MS-DOS Russian),
869 __NOTOC__ Year 869 ( DCCCLXIX) was a common year starting on Saturday (link will display the full calendar) of the Julian calendar. Events By place Byzantine Empire * Summer – Emperor Basil I allies with the Frankish emperor L ...
(IBM Greek), 874 (Thai), 932 (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 (Chinese: Traditional), " Macintosh Character Set" (US Roman), and " Windows OEM Character Set". 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 Sindhi may refer to: *something from, or related to Sindh, a province of Pakistan * Sindhi people, an ethnic group from the Sindh region * Sindhi language, the Indo-Aryan language spoken by them People with the name * Sarkash Sindhi (1940–2012 ...
, 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
/ref>


See also

* Other well-known fonts with Unicode coverage include: **
Bitstream Cyberbit ''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 ...
**
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 **
Lucida Sans Unicode In digital typography, Lucida Sans Unicode OpenType font from the design studio of Bigelow & HolmesAll Bigelow & Holmes Lucida typefaces are distributed by the designers througThe Lucida Fonts Storeand a subset of Lucida fonts is distributed bAs ...
* Free software Unicode typefaces * 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