Cidfont !link! -

Standard font encodings (like WinAnsiEncoding ) are limited in how many characters they can address. CIDFonts, by utilizing a CMap, can support character sets of practically unlimited size. This made them the de facto standard for CJK publishing, allowing a single font resource to contain every necessary character without running out of "slots."

Because the mapping logic is separated from the glyph logic, the same CIDFont file can be used with different CMaps. You can re-purpose a font for different encoding standards (like Shift-JIS, EUC-JP, or Unicode) simply by swapping out the CMap, without needing to re-compile or alter the actual glyph outlines. cidfont