Fonts increasingly venture outside of locales. Its very common for one font to have all western-European characters, or even all European (including Cyrillic) characters. This is especially true for the default system fonts.
CJK fonts often include not only CJK, but European characters as well. Almost always at least ASCII.
Ultimately, having a single font for all characters is desirable: Having to go track down more fonts because you're seeing � in your text is a pretty bad experience. Substituting other fonts is at best a kluge, as it often looks terrible.
Projects like DejaVu who plan to eventually cover all living scripts (http://dejavu-fonts.org/wiki/Plans) are not only a good thing but they are also making substantial progress.
Also, even in ASCII, there are a bunch of confusing characters (all depend on which font, of course): I (eye), l (ell), 1 (one), | (vertical bar); O (oh), and 0 (zero); {} (braces) and () (parentheses); 5 (five), S (ess), and $ (dollar), rn (r-n) and m; vv (v-v) and w; etc.
Wе nееԁ tօ fⅰnⅾ Ьеttеr ѕоⅼυtions tҺаɳ vіѕυаⅼⅼУ dіѕtіɳgυіѕҺing сҺаrаⅽtеrѕ.
CJK fonts often include not only CJK, but European characters as well. Almost always at least ASCII.
Ultimately, having a single font for all characters is desirable: Having to go track down more fonts because you're seeing � in your text is a pretty bad experience. Substituting other fonts is at best a kluge, as it often looks terrible.
Projects like DejaVu who plan to eventually cover all living scripts (http://dejavu-fonts.org/wiki/Plans) are not only a good thing but they are also making substantial progress.
Also, even in ASCII, there are a bunch of confusing characters (all depend on which font, of course): I (eye), l (ell), 1 (one), | (vertical bar); O (oh), and 0 (zero); {} (braces) and () (parentheses); 5 (five), S (ess), and $ (dollar), rn (r-n) and m; vv (v-v) and w; etc.
Wе nееԁ tօ fⅰnⅾ Ьеttеr ѕоⅼυtions tҺаɳ vіѕυаⅼⅼУ dіѕtіɳgυіѕҺing сҺаrаⅽtеrѕ.