Arial Unicode MS

Compared to Arial, it includes higher line height, omits kerning pairs and adds enough glyphs to cover a large subset of Unicode 2.1—thus supporting most Microsoft code pages, but also requiring much more storage space (22 megabytes).

[1] It also adds Ideographic layout tables, but unlike Arial, it mandates no smoothing in the 14–18 point range, and contains Roman (upright) glyphs only; there is no oblique (italic) version.

The lack of kerning pairs in Arial Unicode MS may also affect inter-glyph spacing in some renderers (for example the Adobe Flash Player).

From 1993 to 1999, it was extended as Arial Unicode MS (with its first release as a TrueType font in 1998) by the following members of Monotype Typography's Monotype Type Drawing Office, under contract to Microsoft: Brian Allen, Evert Bloemsma, Jelle Bosma, Joshua Hadley, Wallace Ho, Kamal Mansour, Steve Matteson, and Thomas Rickner.

From mid-2001 through mid-2002, Arial Unicode MS was also available as a separate download for licensed users of the standalone version of Microsoft Publisher 2000 SR-1, which did not ship with the font.

Numerous companies, organizations, educational establishments and even governments were directing users to the download without referencing the need for a valid Publisher or Office license or any Microsoft operating system.

The font is also apparently licensed to Apple, who announced on October 16, 2007 that their flagship operating system, Mac OS X v10.5 ("Leopard"), would be bundled with Arial Unicode.

It includes 51,180 glyphs (38,911 characters), supports 32 code pages, and contains Latin and Han Ideographic OpenType layout tables.

This bug affects the rendering of text written in the International Phonetic Alphabet and in ALA-LC Romanization for non-Latin-script languages.

Demonstration of the double-width diacritic bug in Arial Unicode MS. The first row shows how Arial Unicode MS incorrectly renders a diacritic that is correctly placed between the letters "k" and "p". The second row shows how the diacritic is rendered in the correct position only if placed after the "p". The third row shows how the correct placement is rendered in TITUS Cyberbit Basic, which does not have the bug.