There are no pan Unicode fonts. Last one I saw was for Unicode 2.0

There is a limit to the number of glyphs a font can contain.

It is possible to create a subset of unicode and place it in a single font,
but you need to be able to identify your current and future character
requirements.

But not sure why you need a single font, unless your xml to pdf conversion
can't process stylesheets.

Andrew

On Saturday, 17 March 2012, 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
>

-- 
Andrew Cunningham
Senior Project Manager, Research and Development
Vicnet
State Library of Victoria
Australia

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