Question

I’m internationalizing an application into many different languages, and the following languages must be supported:

1. English
2. Spanish
3. German
4. French
5. Russian
6. Mandarin Chinese
7. Thai

We’re also probably going to add support for:

1. Hindi
2. Portuguese
3. Any other language people at work speak and can translate easily

Should I install different fonts for each language, or should I go with one massive font installation of Arial Unicode MS? And if I do the latter, are there any legal implications of adding the font into the installer?

This problem is in .NET 3.5, but I think the general problem is (programming) language independent.

Answer 1

We’ve decided to go the following route:

For latin-based character sets, we’re going to use the Gentium-based fonts. These fonts are covered under the Open Font License, which means that we have to include a copyright notice with the software and an acknowledgment in the UI.

When we go to the Asian languages, we’ll probably either email the creator of WenQuanYi Zen Hei (on his site, he states that he’s open to commercial use, but for a fee), or the creator of Code2000. Incidentally, for Hindi fonts, Code2000 looks really good, but not so much for the Latin-1 fonts (a bit too wide, very typographic rather than screen-based).