Several font foundries are already offering multilingual OpenType versions of their fonts. In addition to the common western European languages, these also cover Polish, Hungarian, Czech, Turkish, and more. Fonts are even appearing that cover Cyrillic and Greek too, all in the one font file.

Of course, it was possible to print Arabic, Russian, Greek and Polish before OpenType. What is the big deal, you might well ask? The answer lies in the use of unified character codes, or Unicode. This means that documents are saved with their character codes intact. They will survive moving from one machine to another, and their text will survive being copied from one application to another, or even e-mailed.

For example, with old font formats it was not possible to print a document that included both French and Polish accented characters without changing fonts. With Unicode and OpenType fonts, all the thousands of characters in Unicode are available to an author, and changing the font is something you can do throughout document creation.