[XeTeX] OpenType font that includes CJK & IPA

Joel C. Salomon joelcsalomon at gmail.com
Wed Sep 23 02:04:57 CEST 2009


Yo Sato wrote:
> I wonder if there is any opentype (or some other free Linux) fontset
> that includes both CJK and IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) in
> full. Well, if not in full, in part.
> 
> What I need to do is write a mainly English text, with Korean, Chinese
> and Japanese data, with IPA notations, on Linux. You could surely use,
> say four fontsets in XeTeX, one for Korean, one for Chinese, one for
> Japanese and the last for IPA, but this would be messy, I suppose. So
> ideally a single fontset, perhaps two failing that, that encompasses
> all the above would be nice.

Will a single font suffice for CJK?  I have heard that there are Unicode
characters that have the same “meaning” across languages, but have
different preferred forms.  (The twisty side of Han unification.)  Some
fonts should be clever enough to display the different forms depending
on which OpenType script is active, but I don’t know which.  (And it
isn’t likely to be free.)

And since you need to run a fontspec command to change scripts, it’s
really no more work to change fonts as well.

—Joel Salomon


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