With the relatively recent introduction and adoption of advanced font technologies, there has been a great deal of interest in how the numerous possibilities afforded by these systems can be implemented to solve specific script and language problems. Of particular interest are those issues which The Unicode Standard itself was never intended to address.

An example is the issue of Han De-Unification, and the question of whether it is possible to have fonts that simultaneously support more than a single Asian locale. A single-glyph-to-Unicode codepoint mapping scheme is not sufficient, since slightly different writing styles are preferred (and in some cases, required) in various Asian locales.

Another concern is with complex writing systems, such as the various Indic scripts, where not only are additional glyphs required, but a significant amount of rule-based rearrangement, repositioning, and substitution is needed for even basic typography. Arabic and Thai are other cases where it is necessary to have more glyphs than characters to maintain existing typographic traditions.

Using example fonts, we will demonstrate and explain how these issues can be addressed through the use of OpenType font technology.