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Arial Unicode MS

Microsoft link for licensing. The font Arial Unicode MS is a full Unicode font, containing all of the approximately 40,000 alphabetical characters, ideographic characters, and symbols defined in the Unicode 2.1 standard. Arial was designed by Robin Nicholas and Patricia Saunders in 1982 for Agfa Monotype 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'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.

There is no italic version---only a regular and bold exist. Arial Unicode MS is normally distributed with Microsoft Office, but it is also bundled with Mac OS X v10.5 and later. It may also be purchased separately (as Arial Unicode) from Ascender Corporation (now absorbed by Monotype), who licenses the font from Microsoft.

Regarding the difference with ordinary Arial, we read this technical explanation on Wikipedia: When rendered with the same engine and without making adjustments for the different font metrics, the glyphs 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 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.

EXTERNAL LINKS
Arial Unicode MS
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INTERNAL LINKS
Standards/ISO/Unicode ⦿ Cyrillic type design ⦿ Greek/Coptic ⦿ Hebrew font links ⦿