Recommended font(s) for displaying unicode characters?

Question

For anyone that has developed a customer-facing Java Swing application that supports multiple languages, which font(s) did you find best displayed the characters for all languages?

Answer 1

Why not create your own?

You can create your own fonts with tools like the Icomoon App. This app allows you to do each of the following :

• Get one or more icons from several popular icon fonts
• Upload other fonts, which may be icon fonts but also regular fonts
• Combine any number of icons from any number of available fonts
• Set the UNICODE hex value for whichever characters you need
• Export and/or save the font set you create

I used the Icomoon App to create the Emoji emoticon font. I also use it for creating custom icon fonts on a per project basis, but it can also be used to create custom fonts that support exactly those languages you need to support.

Answer 2

You should also read Loading Font Configuration Files on font configuration with Java 6. This file allows you to specify which font can be used to represent glyphs from a specific locale. I had to use and configure it once, and it really helped me.

Answer 3

See wikipedia on unicode. It has a nice list and a comparison chart of unicode fonts. It seems GNU Unifont support most of the languages.