double-byte font

Type

glossary

Description

A font in which each character is represented by 2 bytes. Languages such as Japanese, Chinese, and Korean, which contain more symbols than can be represented by 256 code points, require double-byte character sets.

Double-byte fonts usually also contain a full complement of alphabetic characters occupying the first 256 positions in the font, so you can display Roman-alphabet text and Unicode text using the same font.