History and Availability
Arial was designed by Robin Nicholas and Patricia Saunders in 1982 and was released as TrueType font in 1990. From 1993 to 1999, it was extended as Arial Unicode MS (with its first release as a TrueType font in 1998) by the following members of Monotype Typography's Monotype Type Drawing Office, under contract to Microsoft: Brian Allen, Evert Bloemsma, Jelle Bosma, Joshua Hadley, Wallace Ho, Kamal Mansour, Steve Matteson, and Thomas Rickner.
From mid-2001 through mid-2002, Arial Unicode MS was also available as a separate download for licensed users of the standalone version of Microsoft Publisher 2000 SR-1, which did not ship with the font. The freely downloadable version was withdrawn after Microsoft Publisher 2002, which included the font, began shipping. The withdrawal coincided with the withdrawal of the free downloads of Microsoft's "Core fonts for the Web". Numerous companies, organizations, educational establishments and even governments were directing users to the download without referencing the need for a valid Publisher or Office license or any Microsoft operating system.
Monotype Imaging still owns the Arial and Arial Unicode MS trademarks, but Microsoft once retained exclusive licensing rights to the fonts.
On 2005-04-11, Ascender Corporation announced it had entered an agreement with Microsoft which enables Ascender to distribute Microsoft fonts, including the Windows Core Fonts, the Microsoft Web Fonts and the many multilingual fonts currently supplied by Microsoft. Called Arial Unicode, it is sold for approximately $99 per 5 users.
The font is also apparently licensed to Apple, who announced on October 16, 2007 that their flagship operating system, Mac OS X v10.5 ("Leopard"), would be bundled with Arial Unicode. Leopard also ships with several other previously Microsoft-only fonts, including Microsoft Sans Serif, Tahoma and Wingdings.
Monotype Imaging currently also licenses Arial Unicode on its own. It was also bundled by Monotype as part of iPhone Compatibility Font Set.
Read more about this topic: Arial Unicode MS
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