"Universal" font

Question

Hello everybody !!!!
I'm looking for a font that can handles every type of characters, from the latin alphabet till the cyrillic alphabet via the asiatic alphabets (japanese, chinese, ..). I though that Lucida Grande would do it, but apparently not (when I embed this font on my appli, it doens't display correctly the characters..). With a japanese character I though that I would have manage to find it, but unfortunately the russian is craply displayed (with a huge letter-spacing)
So do you know if this magic font exist or how to find it ?
In other case, do you know how to find the character palette on the mac that would list me all the font available on my mac and which alphabet these fonts handle ?
Or maybe a website with fonts and their cover ?
Thanks a lot for any help !!!

Answer 1

You'll need multiple fonts for East Asian languages. Specifically, separate fonts for each of simplified and traditional Chinese, Japanese, and Korean.
As I wrote just the other day on Typophile, the particularly thorny problem is dealing with the Han unification characters. Basically, for certain East Asian characters, There are slightly (or sometimes very) different designs for certain characters for all these different languages. Currently, the only functional way to distinguish them is to build an OpenType font with the locl (locale) feature, and use apps/OSes that process that feature correctly for those languages.
Im not sure how widespread such app/OS support is for the locl feature with those languages, outside of InDesign CS3, but I know that such fonts are pretty much non-existent in the wild. AFAIK, thus far such fonts have only been built by mad scientists in labs (pace Adobe's own Dr Lunde & Mr Meyer).
Because of the potential for great efficiency (space savings), I imagine we will see such fonts in the wild in the future.
Cheers,
T