What is UNICODE font

[Face]

I use UNICODE to read or type in Sinhala & Tamil also.What is the deference between in "normal fonts & Unicode Fonts"?

Why can't we read or type by using normal font in our memory.
It is really easy to install normal fonts..But Unicode fonts have complex installing process.

can any one explain about this UNICODE fonts..& its technology?

[Neo]

There are only few differences between them. The main is the number of glyphs both can accommodate within a single font. Normal fonts can only keep 255 glyphs. In early ages, computers were deigned to operate with 8-bit (1 byte) MAU (minimum allocation unit). Due to the reason that 1 byte can have up to 256 combinations (0 to 255), the concept of character was introduced to reside on a single byte. So a font file could have up to 256 glyphs. In addition to letters, numbers and special symbols like +,-, *, etc... are all stored within this 256 limit. This was very much enough for most of the popular languages including English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, etc... In the other hand, those days the RAMs, Disk Drives were very small and it was also important to optimise the usage of space.

Later, the computer empire had expanded to far eastern countries like Sri Lanka, India, China, Japan, etc... where their native character set can't reside within 256 limit. So the world had to think of a new method to accommodate such character sets. This is where UNICODE came in to action. UNICODE stores a single character in a 16-bit (2 bytes) space. So it is possible to store up to 65536 characters in a UNICODE font.

With the introduction of UNICODE, it was possible to support languages like Sinhalese, Tamil, Hindi, Chinese, Japanese, etc... that are having complicated glyphs.

A special mark was added to the signature of TTF format to distinguish between normal and UNICODE fonts. I think you have the basic idea now.

[Face]

thank you brother....
I got the main idea.But some questions?
font are really user friendly than Unicode.because we can use many sizes colors with fonts..But I don't know any way to change sizes & colors in Unicode....???

Is there any way to change colors & sizes with Unicode...?

[Neo]

First, you must realise that UNICODE fonts (2-bytes, 65536 combinations) are also fonts just as ASCII (1-byte, 256 combinations) fonts.

font are really user friendly than Unicode

This is from wikipedia article.

Free and retail fonts based on Unicode are widely available, since TrueType and OpenType support Unicode. These font formats map Unicode code points to glyphs.

So you must realise that fonts can be in the format of UNICODE, so it carries the same features as standard fonts.

because we can use many sizes colors with fonts..But I don't know any way to change sizes & colors in Unicode....???

This is not true. If you take a TrueType fonts (TTF), in addition to glyph maps (image of the font), it carries certain other properties like, shading, 3D rules, etc... You can program it to have different sizes of fonts or to have just one size. In simple terms, it all depends on how you program the font.

Just as other fonts, if the rules for different sizes, etc... are included in font rules, Unicode fonts have no difference to other fonts. For example see what I did with Sarasavi Unicode font

Sarasavi.PNG (6.01 KiB) Viewed 5872 times

[Face]

oh.interesting....
I use Unicode in FACE BOOK in that I tried to change font size....But couldn't..That's why I ask that question..

Thank you my friend.!!

[Neo]

I have added an article about Understanding Sinhala/Tamil UNICODE.

Hope it might also help you to understand UNICODE clearly.