Is it possible to split a unicode font such as Arial Unicode into a specific language block (Ex. Thai)?

I am working with an user interface application, and I am attempting to implement various languages. The problem is that text display only supports 256 character fonts that are imported into a font tool. The font tool takes each character and converts it to a special bmp for the device to use as a text.

My issue is that I would like a specific language out of the Arial Unicode font. For example, I want to take all the Thai l开发者_如何学编程anguage characters from Arial Unicode and separate them into a special Thai font (with a max of 256 characters) so that I can load this into the program and convert it.

Is this possible?

Thanks, Mike

Possible? Certainly, fonts are data with (usually) open specification. Which tool to use? I don't know. I guess that you could launch FontForge (or other good font editor) and remove glyphs you don't need, or rearrange them as you wish.

Also you could decompile a TTF font with TTX, edit it as plain-text and recompile again. This has the advantage of being easily scripted.

Yes it is possible but may not be very practical to do so.

As liori has pointed out, FontForge and TTX are two possible tools you can use.

However Arial Unicode is a monster of a font; I had TTX crashing on me when I tried to decompile 5-6MB ttf fonts so I don't think it will work on Arial Unicode.I imagine removing the unneeded glyphs using FontForge will be tedious as well.

Instead of trying to extract the glyphs from Arial Unicode I think the best way is to simply use smaller, script specific ttf fonts instead.