Font Selection and Font Composition for Unicode

The integration of the current scripts of the world into a single character encoding standard (Unicode/ISO 10646) poses new challenges to system software and user interface designers, typographers, and font providers. Constructing or designing all-encompassing “Unicode fonts” is not feasible for several reasons in most cases; much more flexible solutions are necessary. The paper analyses the requirements for flexible font selection and composition mechanisms from the viewpoints of typography, user interface, programmer interface and resource usage. Based on an object-oriented application framework, an architecture to satisfy these requirements in an extensible way is proposed and implemented. The tasks of font selection and glyph mapping are reduced to the same basic concepts, which also lead to interesting solutions for problems such as CJKV glyph disambiguation, and allow the easy integration of proprietary algorithms.