Wide fonts are larger than standard 8-bit fonts and allow for more complex symbols and multiple languages. They require customization for specific operating systems and use more memory, but modern computers can handle them easily.
A wide font is a computer font that is larger than the standard 8-bit size. Characters in a computer set such as the Universal Character Set (USC) illustrate a great example of wide characters, since USC can be encoded in either 16-bit or 32-bit formats. This differs from older standardized character sets such as the American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII), which use no more than 7-bit characters. The advantage of coding character sets in large fonts is that it allows more breathing room when it comes time to add additional and complex symbols to the set, giving character designers a greater range of freedom. The disadvantages come in the form of additional memory consumption, as large character sets use more system memory while active on your computer.
Character sets need to be customized to work with specific operating systems, and wide fonts are no different. For Windows® operating systems, both 32-bit and 64-bit versions, wide character sets must be customized to fit a 16-bit framework, offering double the storage capacity for each character compared to a “standard” set 8-bit. Unix®, on the other hand, requires large characters to fit a 32-bit framework, offering four times the capacity of a basic character set.
The biggest advantage of large character sets is that they allow for non-standard symbols and greater versatility in including different languages within their interfaces. For example, broad character sets can include the standard English alphabet, along with languages like Cyrillic and Greek simultaneously. This means that a single wide character set can be applied to individuals spanning multiple countries, instead of requiring a unique non-wide character set for each individual language region.
While useful for helping standardize software releases across different language regions, wide character sets come at a price. That price is an extra cost in terms of memory overhead. While a 16-bit character set offers twice the capacity of a standard 8-bit set, it also consumes twice as much memory. The same goes for 32-bit character sets, which eat up four times as much memory as conventional character sets.
From a computational and statistical point of view, this is a significant “cost” for memory. In practical application, however, the cost is not as high as it might seem. Modern computers often contain four or more gigabytes of system memory, making storing even a large 32-bit character set virtually negligible. Only heavily loaded or less powerful computers will notice a noticeable performance hit from using large character sets.
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