I'm wondering about where your magical number 65535 comes from. Current version of Unicode supports more characters than this, and the Basic Multilingual Plane actually contains less than 65535.

But a font can only encode 65535 glyphs.

@Tom - I've wondered about that. What is the history or technology behind that limitation? Doesn't unicode extend to 8-byte codes, which, at least numerically, would allow for something over four billion codes?

- Herb

Nope, that's four-byte (32-bit) codes. Ya gotta square yer four billions to get the bignum for eight-byte (64-bit) codes.

Neue Helvetica Std, Pro, Com and W1G versions are available to license through Linotype, here.

Unless of course you mean the new release of the older font that eventually became Neue Helvetica, that is, Neue Haas Grotesk, which is also available in Std and Pro variations through Linotype, here.

Glyphs are restricted to a double-byte space. Storage of glyphs in a font is by glyph ID, which is independent of encoding. Unicode or other encodings are handled by the cmap table, which maps from Unicode (or other encodings) to glyph ID.

Unicode has just under a million possible codepoints. Of those about 110,000 are assigned as of Unicode 6.1. A large chunk are reserved for private use, so will never be assigned.