Arial Unicode MS: Your Safest Bet For Consistent Foreign Language Display
If you’ve ever had to manage and develop international email campaigns, you may know how frustrating getting the text to display consistently across all major email clients is. With multiple languages and their vast character sets, it’s difficult to find one font that can support so many foreign characters.
Recently, we have been developing email templates specifically for Chinese users. During testing, everything was going smooth until we began testing for Outlook ‘07 (no surprise there).
From troubleshooting and tweaking the code, we determined that if you’re going to code an email for Chinese users, make sure the text renders using the Arial Unicode MS font.
This is the most forgiving and widely-accepted font, especially for Chinese characters. It contains all of the characters, ideographs and symbols defined in the Unicode 2.1 standard. It is distributed with Microsoft Office, it is automatically installed with Vista and XP and is also bundled with OS X 10.5 and later. Unfortunately, it does not ship with Windows 7. You can find more on this on Microsoft’s Unicode Support Page.
Microsoft owns AUMS, which is no surprise why anything other than the sans-serif font would work in Outlook ‘07. Oh, and Outlook ‘07 is stupid and doesn’t know how to search for similar fonts unlike every other email client on the market. Just sayin’.
So if you’re sending out emails that are encoded for UTF-8 which use fonts other than AUMS, the likelihood that all of the characters will display is slim.
Posted by Bryan Quilty on Jul. 01, 2010