6 ms·

> Ask the people behind your Operating System and those who design your favourite fonts to start supporting Unicode 9! Surely not every font has to create glyp

by smegel 10y ago

> Ask the people behind your Operating System and those who design your favourite fonts to start supporting Unicode 9! Surely not every font has to create glyphs for every Unicode character...how does that work? Is there a kind of "fall-back" font for characters not implemented?

Gracana 10y ago
There is exactly that! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallback_font https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallback_font
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
abritinthebay 10y ago
Sort of. Font substitution is a thing in most operating systems. As long as one font on the system has those characters it should work. Not always true though, and can depend on the application using the right system calls for rendering text (for example).
medgno 10y ago
Systems have a way of finding fall-back fonts. At least on OS X (err, macOS) they will satisfy glyph requests in order from the font you specify, some built-in fonts, and then any fonts that have the required glyphs. Finally, a "last resort" font is used to fill in any remaining glyphs[1]. A result of this is that if you ask for a character such as "𓀴" (U+13034 EGYPTIAN HIEROGLYPH A044) in a monospace font, the symbol you get back can be variable width. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallback_font https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallback_font
- pavanky 10y ago
  And I see a boxes (on linux)
  - aarongolliver 10y ago
    Same on win10/chrome. Works on edge though.
  - kalleboo 10y ago
    On my Mac it gets displayed with "Noto Sans Egyptian Hieroglyhs" which appears to be included in the system (/Library/Application Support/Apple/Fonts/Language Support) but can be downloaded for other platforms from here https://www.google.com/get/noto/ https://www.google.com/get/noto/
  - benkuykendall 10y ago
    That's not an inherent problem with GNU/Linux. Shows up fine for me because I have "ttf-ancient-scripts" (https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/ttf-ancient-fonts/ https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/ttf-ancient-fonts/) installed.
- pcr0 10y ago
  I see a box with these two lines inside it: 013 034 OSX 10.11.4
- umanwizard 10y ago
  Ah, so is that why emojis don't display correctly in vim? They spill out of the character's bounding box...
  - legulere 10y ago
    That sounds more like a problem of your terminal. The basic problem is that Unicode characters (which may consist of as many codepoints as you like) have varying width. For instance Chinese has characters that are displayed over a width of two normal monospace characters. See this hacker news post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10206380 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10206380 So the problem with emojis is that they aren't really specified to be full width or half width characters: https://ianrenton.com/blog/adventures-in-emoji/ https://ianrenton.com/blog/adventures-in-emoji/
    - legulere 10y ago
      Apparently emoji representations are defined to be wide by unicode 9 now: http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr11/tr11-31.html#Modifications http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr11/tr11-31.html#Modificatio...
- the8472 10y ago
  I have a font for that, but the character is unreadably small while it's perfectly fine for latin characters. Many other unicode symbols also suffer from this problem. E.g. ␀ is the printable version of the unprintable NUL (\0) control character, but it's so small at 13.3px / 10pt CSS font size that it's difficult to distinguish from the other control pictures. ␀ ␁ ␂ ␃ ␄ ␅ ␆ ␇ ␈ ␉ ␊ ␋ ␌ ␍ ␎ ␏ ␐ ␑ ␒ ␓ ␔ ␕ ␖ ␗ ␘ ␙ ␚ ␛ ␜ ␝ ␞ ␟ ␠ ␡ How those look on display w/o pixel scaling: https://i.imgur.com/lAAyjXu.png https://i.imgur.com/lAAyjXu.png
  - lucaspiller 10y ago
    They are also very small on my computer (Chrome on OS X 10.11.5, external non-'Retina' monitor), but they are vertically aligned instead of diagonal: http://i.imgur.com/kKfLYgx.jpg http://i.imgur.com/kKfLYgx.jpg Interestingly in Safari the hieroglyph is shown (still small though), I wonder why Chrome can't find it?
  - heinrich5991 10y ago
    FWIW on my screen, they're really distinguishable: https://i.imgur.com/IdUK8MV.png https://i.imgur.com/IdUK8MV.png.
    - the8472 10y ago
      The spade symbol[0] is codepoint 9824, the acknowledge control picture[1] (␆) is codepoint 9222. They shouldn't be using the same glyph. [0] http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/2660/index.htm http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/2660/index.htm [1] http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/2406/index.htm http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/2406/index.htm
    - j4_james 10y ago
      That looks like your browser is somehow misinterpreting the character set of the page. What you're seeing appears to be something like code page 437 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_page_437 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_page_437) rather than unicode. What browser/os are you using? Is it possible you're going through a proxy that is altering the HTTP headers?
johncolanduoni 10y ago
This isn't even possible for most font formats. There are over 100k assigned code points, but TTF and OTF both use unsigned 16-bit glyph indices, giving a maximum of 65,536 glyphs per font. Not all code points map to glyphs, but some glyphs are also not directly associated to code points (for example, some Unicode combining marks require separate glyphs in certain combinations).
lifthrasiir 10y ago
There are some, and I have tried to make one myself [1] to learn OpenType and scripts. It is hard and takes much time and effort to get a good one (Noto fonts [2] are probably the closest font that covers the entire Unicode and looks great). I admit that it is still hard even when you don't have the looks-good requirement. [1] https://github.com/lifthrasiir/unison https://github.com/lifthrasiir/unison [2] https://www.google.com/get/noto/ https://www.google.com/get/noto/

by smegel 10y ago

Gracana 10y ago

There is exactly that! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallback_font https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallback_font

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

abritinthebay 10y ago

Sort of. Font substitution is a thing in most operating systems. As long as one font on the system has those characters it should work. Not always true though, and can depend on the application using the right system calls for rendering text (for example).

medgno 10y ago

Systems have a way of finding fall-back fonts. At least on OS X (err, macOS) they will satisfy glyph requests in order from the font you specify, some built-in fonts, and then any fonts that have the required glyphs. Finally, a "last resort" font is used to fill in any remaining glyphs[1]. A result of this is that if you ask for a character such as "𓀴" (U+13034 EGYPTIAN HIEROGLYPH A044) in a monospace font, the symbol you get back can be variable width. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallback_font https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallback_font

pavanky 10y ago
And I see a boxes (on linux)
- aarongolliver 10y ago
  Same on win10/chrome. Works on edge though.
- kalleboo 10y ago
  On my Mac it gets displayed with "Noto Sans Egyptian Hieroglyhs" which appears to be included in the system (/Library/Application Support/Apple/Fonts/Language Support) but can be downloaded for other platforms from here https://www.google.com/get/noto/ https://www.google.com/get/noto/
- benkuykendall 10y ago
  That's not an inherent problem with GNU/Linux. Shows up fine for me because I have "ttf-ancient-scripts" (https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/ttf-ancient-fonts/ https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/ttf-ancient-fonts/) installed.
pcr0 10y ago
I see a box with these two lines inside it: 013 034 OSX 10.11.4
umanwizard 10y ago
Ah, so is that why emojis don't display correctly in vim? They spill out of the character's bounding box...
- legulere 10y ago
  That sounds more like a problem of your terminal. The basic problem is that Unicode characters (which may consist of as many codepoints as you like) have varying width. For instance Chinese has characters that are displayed over a width of two normal monospace characters. See this hacker news post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10206380 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10206380 So the problem with emojis is that they aren't really specified to be full width or half width characters: https://ianrenton.com/blog/adventures-in-emoji/ https://ianrenton.com/blog/adventures-in-emoji/
  - legulere 10y ago
    Apparently emoji representations are defined to be wide by unicode 9 now: http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr11/tr11-31.html#Modifications http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr11/tr11-31.html#Modificatio...
the8472 10y ago
I have a font for that, but the character is unreadably small while it's perfectly fine for latin characters. Many other unicode symbols also suffer from this problem. E.g. ␀ is the printable version of the unprintable NUL (\0) control character, but it's so small at 13.3px / 10pt CSS font size that it's difficult to distinguish from the other control pictures. ␀ ␁ ␂ ␃ ␄ ␅ ␆ ␇ ␈ ␉ ␊ ␋ ␌ ␍ ␎ ␏ ␐ ␑ ␒ ␓ ␔ ␕ ␖ ␗ ␘ ␙ ␚ ␛ ␜ ␝ ␞ ␟ ␠ ␡ How those look on display w/o pixel scaling: https://i.imgur.com/lAAyjXu.png https://i.imgur.com/lAAyjXu.png
- lucaspiller 10y ago
  They are also very small on my computer (Chrome on OS X 10.11.5, external non-'Retina' monitor), but they are vertically aligned instead of diagonal: http://i.imgur.com/kKfLYgx.jpg http://i.imgur.com/kKfLYgx.jpg Interestingly in Safari the hieroglyph is shown (still small though), I wonder why Chrome can't find it?
- heinrich5991 10y ago
  FWIW on my screen, they're really distinguishable: https://i.imgur.com/IdUK8MV.png https://i.imgur.com/IdUK8MV.png.
  - the8472 10y ago
    The spade symbol[0] is codepoint 9824, the acknowledge control picture[1] (␆) is codepoint 9222. They shouldn't be using the same glyph. [0] http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/2660/index.htm http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/2660/index.htm [1] http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/2406/index.htm http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/2406/index.htm
  - j4_james 10y ago
    That looks like your browser is somehow misinterpreting the character set of the page. What you're seeing appears to be something like code page 437 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_page_437 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_page_437) rather than unicode. What browser/os are you using? Is it possible you're going through a proxy that is altering the HTTP headers?

johncolanduoni 10y ago

This isn't even possible for most font formats. There are over 100k assigned code points, but TTF and OTF both use unsigned 16-bit glyph indices, giving a maximum of 65,536 glyphs per font. Not all code points map to glyphs, but some glyphs are also not directly associated to code points (for example, some Unicode combining marks require separate glyphs in certain combinations).

lifthrasiir 10y ago

There are some, and I have tried to make one myself [1] to learn OpenType and scripts. It is hard and takes much time and effort to get a good one (Noto fonts [2] are probably the closest font that covers the entire Unicode and looks great). I admit that it is still hard even when you don't have the looks-good requirement. [1] https://github.com/lifthrasiir/unison https://github.com/lifthrasiir/unison [2] https://www.google.com/get/noto/ https://www.google.com/get/noto/