A question about fonts

[Andersen, Jan]

"I don't think things are quite as dire as you suggest.  It should be possible to put together on one system a set of fonts that cover all the Unicode points you need."

I wasn't suggesting things were dire :-) 

And I already know that I can cover most if not all of the range I am interested in with a few fonts - what I am after is something like the ability to specify just one font that will cover everything. I can imagine several ways one could achieve that if the system would support it - one way would be if one could somewhere define a "composite font": you would use this just like any font in applications, but the back-end somewhere would look at the character value and select which of the component fonts to use. Or one could replace the lookup-part with something that isn't limited to 64K characters - perhaps even an SQL database :-)

I suspect doing the latter (replacing the lookup) may well be simpler than implementing composite fonts.