Unicode Fonts

When fonts were first established they emerging in the countries where the personal computer was invented and popularized. Initially even accounting for accents was difficult. Early font encodings incorporated many phonetic alphabets but left non-phonetic alphabets, like Chinese, difficult to implement. As numerous regional standards emerged, the need to agree on a standard that, while not displacing major current encodings, enabled the world to connect using a single font format emerged. The answer to this problem was Unicode.

The following resources describe this history of Unicode, as well as the problems that resulted in its creation.

Historical Fonts – Typefaces which Pre-Date Computerized Fonts
Font History – Facts & Fundamentals
Introduction to Fonts - A Brief History
What’s Wrong with FONT? – An Analysis of the FONT tag
Font Preferences – Configuring Fonts Under Windows
Greek Fonts – Display Help
Getting Started with Unicode – Includes how to make Unicode Fonts
Unicode – A review of Early Typefaces
Free Fonts – Free Type 1, TrueType, and Unicode Fonts
Unicode Scripts – A Reference Database
Chinese Converter – Convert between Chinese & Unicode Formats
Traditional Chinese Font Encodings - From the Gallery of Unicode Fonts
Font Usage – Notes on Foreign Language Fonts
Characters Outside of Unicode – Problems with Unicode Representation
History Lesson – Why We Need Unicode
What is Unicode? – A Case Study
The Unicode Consortium – The Organization Overseeing Unicode Standards
Bible Language Fonts – Unicode Fonts for Biblical Languages

Font Book – A Directory of Font Styles
Discontent for Unicode - From the Machine Translations Reading Group
MySQL & Unicode – Necessary Code & Settings
Fonts for Printing Jewish Type – Jewish Language Unicode Fonts
Japanese Fonts – Tips for Representing Japanese Characters on Screen
TEX & Japanese – Freeware Unicode Editor
Cyrillic Fonts – In both Unicode & Non-Unicode Formats
Cyrillic Script Project - For Mac & PC
Transferring Fonts Between Mac & PC – By Eric Tolman
About Stylesheets – Unicode & CSS
Krillika Nova – Free Old Slavonic Unicode Fonts
Chinese Language Tools – Using Unicode With Chinese
Apple FontBook – A Program for Generating Unicode Fonts
Multilingual Web Pages – Using Unicode in Web Pages
The Unicode How-to - Using Unicode on Linux
IPA Alphabet & Unicode - From Linguist.org
Unicode Fonts – Fonts for Math in Unicode Format