http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=13600
Summary: allow using glyphs from mlutiple fonts in font substitution Product: Wine Version: 1.0-rc1 Platform: PC-x86-64 OS/Version: Linux Status: UNCONFIRMED Severity: enhancement Priority: P2 Component: -unknown AssignedTo: wine-bugs@winehq.org ReportedBy: hramrach@centrum.cz
As far as I know there are no acceptable quality fonts that would cover most Unicode ranges. Whatever font one chooses for Wine system font there are many glyphs that aren't present, and know no way to combine multiple fonts to provide the needed glyphs.
The MS core fonts provide proportional fonts that at least do have glyphs in most ranges - iirc at least Latin, CJK, Cyrillic and Greek are covered. However, the readability of the fonts in different ranges varies, and they probably cannot be distributed with Wine because of license issues.
What's worse, I know no fixed width font which covers a decent part of Unicode.
In rxvt-unicode this problem is solved by creating an ordered list of fonts from which the glyphs are taken and resized appropriately. That way the Latin glyphs can be taken from a readable Western font, the CJK glyphs from a decent CJK font (which usually has some poor Latin glyphs as well but they are ignored because it comes after the Western one), etc.
No problem with adding a special font for an exotic range without breaking the other ranges then.