Pinyin Font 1

The Last Resort font is a collection of glyphs to represent types of Unicode characters. These glyphs are designed to allow users to recognize that an encoded value is one of the following […] – Last Resort Font

That all well and good, but what about this:

漢語，又称华语（东南亚）、中國語（日本、韩国等），其他名稱有汉文（通常指文言文）、 中文、华文、唐文、唐話、中國話等，是属汉藏语系的分析语，具有声调。汉语的文字系统——汉字是一种意音语言， 表意的同時也具一定的表音功能。 – 汉语

Here's that in a different type face:

漢語，又称华语（东南亚）、中國語（日本、韩国等），其他名稱有汉文（通常指文言文）、 中文、华文、唐文、唐話、中國話等，是属汉藏语系的分析语，具有声调。汉语的文字系统——汉字是一种意音语言， 表意的同時也具一定的表音功能。 – 汉语

If you look at the source for this page you'll see that, from a Unicode point of view, the two previous quotes are identical - only the typeface is difference. I'll freely admit that I have no idea what the quote means, but I now at least recognise the characters and could, at a push, speak the quote if needed.

In order to do this I built a custom typeface by:

1. starting with a base typeface - in this case I used Chicago, the same as the original Last Resort Font.
2. for each code point, find a mapping to the base typeface - in this case I used the Mandarin Pinyin mappings found in UCD (specifically Unihan.zip)
3. use Minimum Rubber to convert the base typeface and mappings into the a new TrueType font.