Hi All,

We're having some fun with unicode characters in PDF generation. We have a process that automatically generates a pdf from XML input. The tool stack doesn't support multiple fonts for displaying different codepoints so we need a good pan-unicode font to bundle with the pdfs.

Currently, we use the DejaVu font family for creating the pdfs. This has good coverage for latin & cyrillic characters but has no CJK (chinese-japanese-korean) coverage. We've looked into licensing a commercial fonts, but for web server use these require annual licensing fees that are substantial (in the thousands of $).
A number of our source documents contain CJK characters and some contributors have noticed the lack of support for these characters.

Does anyone know of a good pan-unicode free font that includes CJK codepoints that looks good? Gnu unifont has the coverage, but it is not the best looking font.

Barring that, we're thinking of rolling our own pan-unicode font. There are good open source fonts for portions of the unicode character sets. We're hoping to find some way to take a number of open source fonts and combine them into one large pan-unicode font.

Does anyone have experience with font authoring and merging different fonts?

It looks as though FontForge can merge fonts, but it's not clear how to deal with overlapping codepoints in the merged fonts.

Thanks,

Mark