I don't know if it's any good, but TITUS[1] is a pan-unicode font free for
non-commercial use. I don't know if that included embedding in a PDF or not.

1. http://titus.fkidg1.uni-frankfurt.de/unicode/tituut.asp

On Fri, Mar 16, 2012 at 6:13 PM, Mark Redar <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> 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
>



-- 
Bill Dueber
Library Systems Programmer
University of Michigan Library