[Freetype] Question about merged fonts...

[Pedriana, Paul]

I have Freetype running fine, allowing the use of TrueType 
and PostScript fonts in our system fine. 

But there is a higher level issue I've run into. All text 
that we use is Unicode and can in theory call out for 
Western, East European, and Asian characters. But few actual 
fonts out there have all these kinds of characters in a 
single font. If I have a string of text to display that can 
have both English and Japanese in it, it seems to me 
that I often won't be able to use a single font for it. 
For a full-blown word processor, this may not be such a big 
deal because the user can simply highlight the Japanese 
text and manually select a font with Japanese characters 
in it. But I need to have the app do this itself.

Three solutions come to mind:
   - Have the code that draws the text have a list of 
     multiple fonts to use, in order of preference. 
     Thus, if the primary font doesn't have the character 
     I need, try the secondary font. etc. This solution 
     is not very clean but is possible. The problem with 
     it is that application-level code shouldn't have to 
     fuss with font selection itself.

   - Have the font code provide the above multiple font 
     support internally. Thus, my C++ Font class isn't 
     necessarily tied to a single font file but also allows 
     the specification of alternative fonts to use if the 
     primary font doesn't have the needed character. 
     This solution is clean from the application level, 
     but makes gives the C++ Font class implementation 
     some problems.

   - Somehow provide a font file that has all the needed 
     characters in it. The problem with this is that we are
     using licensed font files from people like Monotype 
     and I don't think we can go and alter fonts like that.

How do people solve this problem?