What is a Unicode-conformant font?
A font is never used in isolation: it is one of the components used in text rendering systems. Therefore, it is not strictly meaningful to ask if a font is Unicode-conformant; this question is more pertinent for the rendering system as a whole. Nevertheless, most rendering systems involve some kind of mapping from characters to glyphs, stored in fonts. In sfnt-based fonts, such as TrueType, OpenType and Graphite fonts, default glyph mappings are stored in the ‘cmap’ table; additional tables may substitute alternate glyphs based on context. A Unicode-conformant font can be defined as a font which contains a mapping from Unicode characters and that maps characters to glyphs in a way that is consistent with character semantics defined in the Unicode Standard. For example, a font that includes a character-to-glyph mapping based only on the JIS (Japanese Industrial Standard) character encoding would not be Unicode compliant. (Note, however, that such a font potentially may be used within a
