Since MarcEdit 4.x, MarcEdit has targeted the Arial Unicode MS font as the primary rendering font used for the application.  This was done primarily because it was easy to get due to MS Office, readily available, and provided some of the best coverage for multi-byte language.   However, as of Office 2016, Microsoft is no longer providing the Arial Unicode MS font — so users will likely need to find a new Unicode font.  Fortunately, a good one exists.  Google has worked with a font producer to create the Noto Font series.  These are open fonts, available for download at: https://www.google.com/get/noto/.  These fonts actually provide better coverage than the Arial Unicode MS font, and has become my personal go to font when working with MarcEdit and a myriad of other tools.   It is a great unicode font replacement if you need one.

These fonts are packages as different font groups.  You can download all the groups at: https://noto-website.storage.googleapis.com/pkgs/Noto-hinted.zip.  This is approximately a 450MB download.  If you are looking for an all in one font, I’ve found the stand alone fonts available from the CJK page at: https://www.google.com/get/noto/help/cjk/ are the best to cover most of the data you will normally see in MARC records (unless you are working with Arabic, Hebrew, etc.).  However, given that these fonts are free, my recommendation is that you download the full font-set (all 450 MB) and install all the Noto font set.  Once installed, you will want to select the Noto Sans or Noto Serif parent font.  If you select the parent, the operating system will have references to all fonts in the Noto set (which includes ~100,000 characters.  I’ve found that this is a great way to get exceptionally broad coverage.  Noto does provide a super font, but Windows users cannot use this font at this point because of the lack of CFF format support in the current Windows stack.  Downloading and installing all the fonts however, seems to solve this problem.

System Requirements:

These fonts work on any system that supports the Open Font Format.  One Windows, this means Windows 8+.  I believe that with all Service Packs, Windows 7 should work as well.  Windows XP does *not* support this format and cannot use these fonts.