As the first publicly available OpenType font to contain glyph coverage for all defined characters of The Unicode Standard (Version 2.1), Arial Unicode has generated a great deal of interest, particularly within the multilingual community.

Because of its large size, many people assume that Arial Unicode MS is a "just" a large font with a one-glyph-to-character mapping throughout. Created for inclusion with Microsoft's Office product, it actually contains over 50,000 glyphs (by comparison, Version 2.1 of The Unicode Standard defines about 39,000 non-private characters). Using OpenType technology, it includes features for extended script and language support, such as localized CJK writing style differentiation ("Unihan disambiguation"), Arabic contextual forms, and extensive re-arrangement and substitution features for various Indic scripts. This presentation will highlight some of the OpenType features in Arial Unicode MS, as well as some basic concepts of OpenType and font issues in general.