In digital typography, Arial Unicode MS is an extended version of the OpenType font Arial. Compared to Arial, it features slightly rounder glyphs for the Latin script, omits kerning pairs, and adds enough glyphs to cover a large subset of Unicode 2.1—thus supporting most Microsoft code pages, but also requiring much more storage space. Arial Unicode MS is normally distributed with Microsoft Office, but it may also be purchased separately (as Arial Unicode) from Ascender Corporation, the only company Microsoft allows to license the font. Typographic work Typography (from the Greek words typos = form and graphein = to write) is the art and technique of setting written subject matter in type using a combination of typeface styles, point sizes, line lengths, line leading, character spacing, and word spacing to produce typeset artwork in physical or digital... OpenType is a scalable computer font format initially developed by Microsoft, later joined by Adobe Systems. ... In typography, a typeface consists of a co-ordinated set of grapheme (i. ... Arial is a font packaged with several Microsoft Corporation applications. ... Technical note: Due to technical limitations, some web browsers may not display some special characters in this article. ... Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ: MSFT, SEHK: 4338) is an international computer technology corporation with 2005 global annual sales of close to $40 billion USD and about 64,000 employees in 85 countries and regions which develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of software products for computing devices. ... Code page is the traditional IBM term used for a specific character encoding table: a mapping in which a sequence of bits, usually a single octet representing integer values 0 through 255, is associated with a specific character. ... Microsoft Office is a suite of productivity programs created by Microsoft and developed for Microsoft Windows and Apple Macintosh operating systems. ...

History and availability

Arial was designed by Robin Nicholas and Patricia Saunders in 1982. It was later extended as Arial Unicode MS by Monotype Typography (now Monotype Imaging) under contract to Microsoft. Monotype Imaging still owns the Arial and Arial Unicode MS trademarks, but Microsoft retains exclusive licensing rights to the fonts. Microsoft currently licenses the font exclusively to Ascender Corporation, which sells it for approximately $99 per 5 users. Currently Monotype Imaging, Inc, a typesetting and typeface design company responsible for many developments in printing technology — in particular the Monotype machine which was the first fully mechanical typesetter — and the design and production of typefaces in the 19th and 20th centuries. ... This article is about general United States currency. ...

From mid-2001 through mid-2002, Arial Unicode MS was also available as a separate download for users of the standalone version of Microsoft Publisher 2000 SR-1, which did not ship with the font.[1] The freely downloadable version was withdrawn after Microsoft Publisher 2002, which included the font, began shipping.[2] Since the withdrawal coincided with the withdrawal of the free downloads of Microsoft's "Core fonts for the Web", there was also speculation, at the time, that the font was pulled because it was being illegally redistributed by vendors of non-Microsoft operating systems.[3] Microsoft Publisher is a desktop publishing application from Microsoft. ... Core fonts for the Web was a project started by Microsoft in 1996 to make a standard pack of fonts for the Internet. ...

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 51180 glyphs, supports 32 code pages, and contains Latin and Han Ideographic OpenType layout tables. The code pages supported are 1250 (Latin 2: East Europe), 1251 (Cyrillic), 1252 (Latin 1), 1253 (Greek), 1254 (Turkish), 1255 (Hebrew), 1256 (Arabic), 1257 (Windows Baltic), 1361 (Korean Johab), 437 (US), 708 (Arabic; ASMO 708), 737 (Greek), 775 (MS-DOS Baltic), 850 (WE/Latin 1), 852 (Latin 2), 855 (IBM Cyrillic; primarily Russian), 857 (MS-DOS IBM Turkish), 860 (MS-DOS Portuguese), 861 (MS-DOS Icelandic), 862 (Hebrew), 863 (MS-DOS Canadian French), 864 (Arabic), 865 (MS-DOS Nordic), 866 (MS-DOS Russian), 869 (IBM Greek), 874 (Thai), 932 (JIS/Japan), 936 (Chinese: Simplified), 949 (Korean Wansung), 950 (Chinese: Traditional), "Macintosh Character Set" (US Roman), and "Windows OEM Character Set". OpenType is a scalable computer font format initially developed by Microsoft, later joined by Adobe Systems. ... To meet Wikipedias quality standards, this article or section may require cleanup. ... Windows-1251 is an 8-bit character encoding, designed to cover languages that use the Cyrillic alphabet such as Russian and other languages. ... The legacy components of Microsoft Windows in English and some other Western languages use, by default, an encoding that is a superset of ISO 8859-1, but differs by using displayable characters rather than control characters in the 0x80 to 0x9F range. ... Windows-1253 is a Windows codepage used to write modern Greek (but not polytonic Greek). ... Windows-1254 is a codepage used under Microsoft Windows to write Turkish. ... Windows-1255 is a codepage used under Microsoft Windows to write Hebrew. ... Windows-1256 is a codepage used to write Arabic (and possibly some other languages that use Arabic script) under Microsoft Windows. ... Windows-1257 (Windows Baltic) is a codepage used to write Estonian, Latvian and Lithuanian languages under Microsoft Windows. ... IBM PC or MS-DOS code page 437, often abbreviated CP437 and also known as DOS-US or OEM-US, is the original character set of the IBM PC, circa 1981. ... Code page 737 (CP 737, IBM 737, OEM 737) is a code page to be used under MS-DOS to write Greek language. ... The code page 850 is a code page which was used in occidental Europe, under systems such as DOS. It has been largely replaced with ISO 8859-1 and UTF-8, but is still sometimes used. ... Code page 852 (CP 852, IBM 852, OEM 852) is a code page to be used under MS-DOS with Eastern European languages that use Latin script. ... CP855 is a Cyrillic codepage to be used under MS-DOS. This codepage is not much used. ... Code page 857 (CP 857, IBM 857, OEM 857) is a code page to be used under MS-DOS to write Turkish language. ... Code page 860 (CP 860, IBM 860, OEM 860) is a code page to be used under MS-DOS to write Portuguese language. ... Code page 861 (CP 861, IBM 861, OEM 861) is a code page to be used under MS-DOS to write Icelandic language (as well as other Nordic languages). ... Code page 862 is a code page for Hebrew under DOS. Like ISO 8859-8, it encodes only letters, not vowel-points or cantillation marks. ... Code page 863 (CP 863, IBM 863, OEM 863) is a code page to be used under MS-DOS to write French language (mainly in Canada). ... Code page 865 (CP 865, IBM 865, OEM 865) is a code page to be used under MS-DOS with Nordic languages (except Icelandic, for which CP861 is used). ... CP866 is a Cyrillic codepage to be used with MS-DOS. It is based on the alternative character set of GOST 19768-87. ... Code page 869 (CP 869, IBM 869, OEM 869) is a code page to be used under MS-DOS to write Greek language. ... Code page 932 (aka CP932, Windows-31J) is Microsofts extension of Shift_JIS to include NEC special characters (Row 13), NEC selection of IBM extensions (Rows 89 to 92), and IBM extensions (Rows 115 to 119). ... GBK is an extension of the GB2312 character set for simplified Chinese characters, used in the Peoples Republic of China. ... Code page 949 is Microsofts implementation that appears similar to KSC 5601. ... Code page 950 is Microsofts implementation of the defacto standard Big5. ... The Mac OS Roman character set Mac-Roman encoding is a one byte character encoding system, traditionally used by Mac OS. In Mac OS X, it has been replaced with Unicode. ... IBM PC or MS-DOS code page 437, often abbreviated CP437 and also known as DOS-US or OEM-US, is the original character set of the IBM PC, circa 1981. ...

Version 0.86 has the same coverage and support as 0.84.

Version 1.01 was 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), reflecting the addition of support for Code page 1258 (Vietnamese). It adds layout tables for Devanagari, Gujarati, Gurmukhi, Kana (Hiragana & Katakana), Kannada, and Tamil. Its Han Ideographic tables were updated to support vertical writing. Windows-1258 is a codepage used in Microsoft Windows to represent Vietnamese texts. ...

Bugs

Demonstration of the double-width diacritic bug in Arial Unicode MS. The first row shows how Arial Unicode MS incorrectly renders a diacritic that is correctly placed between the letters "k" and "p". The second row shows how the diacritic is rendered in the correct position only if placed after the "p". The third row shows how the correct placement is rendered in TITUS Cyberbit Basic, which does not have the bug.

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 the 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. Image File history File links Arialunicodebug. ...

This bug affects the rendering of text written in the International Phonetic Alphabet. The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is a system of phonetic notation devised by linguists to accurately and uniquely represent each of the wide variety of sounds (phones or phonemes) used in spoken human language. ...

See also

Other well-known fonts with Unicode coverage include Bitstream Cyberbit, TITUS Cyberbit Basic, Code2000, Doulos SIL, Lucida Sans Unicode, and the Free software Unicode fonts. Bitstream Cyberbit is a commercial Unicode font designed by Bitstream. ... Titus Cyberbit Basic is a Unicode font designed by Bitstream and the TITUS (Thesaurus Indogermanischer Text- und Sprachmaterialien) for Unicode 4. ... Code2000 is a digital font which includes characters and symbols from a very large range of writing systems. ... Doulos SIL is a serif typeface developed by SIL International. ... In digital typography, 's Lucida Sans Unicode OpenType font is designed to support the most commonly used characters defined in version 2. ... A few projects exist to provide free software Unicode fonts, i. ...

External links

• Arial Unicode MS info at Monotype Imaging
• Description of the Arial Unicode MS font in Word 2002—Microsoft Knowledge Base article
• Arial Unicode MS info at Microsoft Typography
• Unicode fonts for Windows computers by Alan Wood
• Arial Unicode info at Ascender Corporation