4 ms·

It is great to see Unicode being able to encode almost every symbol people can think of, however I am still struggling to make them appear on my screen - is the

by nacc 10y ago

It is great to see Unicode being able to encode almost every symbol people can think of, however I am still struggling to make them appear on my screen - is there a good font that has great coverage for unicode? Many times there are clever use of unicode yet I can only see empty rectangles.

glitch 10y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode_font#List_of_Unicode_fonts https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode_font#List_of_Unicode_f...
- rspeer 10y ago
  Keep in mind that what you want may not be one font that covers lots of glyphs -- that makes the font take up lots more memory and take longer to load. And you definitely wouldn't want to use a high-coverage Unicode font as a dynamically-loaded Web font. Operating systems are fine at understanding that different fonts are necessary for different glyphs, so what's better in a lot of cases is to have a family of fonts that together cover all the glyphs you need. That's what Google Noto [1] is doing. [1] https://www.google.com/get/noto/ https://www.google.com/get/noto/ Symbola is a good font for covering a lot of symbols, while not representing many text characters (on the assumption that you already have fonts you prefer for text). That said, there's a justification for having a few of the fonts on that chart, like Lucida Sans Unicode and Arial Unicode MS, because they guarantee consistency without you having to install a huge font family. GNU Unifont is also interesting in a hackery kind of way, in that it achieves good coverage by using only pixelly bitmaps. But on the other hand, Code2000 is an awful font. It eats gobs of memory and it looks bad. Don't use it just because it has a lot of glyphs.
  - cooper12 10y ago
    GNU Unifont is just a fallback font, which I think is what the parent really needs since they're most concerned about seeing the symbol and I doubt consistent appearance with their font. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallback_font https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallback_font
mixmastamyk 10y ago
Symbola is a good one: http://users.teilar.gr/~g1951d/ http://users.teilar.gr/~g1951d/

by nacc 10y ago

glitch 10y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode_font#List_of_Unicode_fonts https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode_font#List_of_Unicode_f...

rspeer 10y ago
Keep in mind that what you want may not be one font that covers lots of glyphs -- that makes the font take up lots more memory and take longer to load. And you definitely wouldn't want to use a high-coverage Unicode font as a dynamically-loaded Web font. Operating systems are fine at understanding that different fonts are necessary for different glyphs, so what's better in a lot of cases is to have a family of fonts that together cover all the glyphs you need. That's what Google Noto [1] is doing. [1] https://www.google.com/get/noto/ https://www.google.com/get/noto/ Symbola is a good font for covering a lot of symbols, while not representing many text characters (on the assumption that you already have fonts you prefer for text). That said, there's a justification for having a few of the fonts on that chart, like Lucida Sans Unicode and Arial Unicode MS, because they guarantee consistency without you having to install a huge font family. GNU Unifont is also interesting in a hackery kind of way, in that it achieves good coverage by using only pixelly bitmaps. But on the other hand, Code2000 is an awful font. It eats gobs of memory and it looks bad. Don't use it just because it has a lot of glyphs.
- cooper12 10y ago
  GNU Unifont is just a fallback font, which I think is what the parent really needs since they're most concerned about seeing the symbol and I doubt consistent appearance with their font. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallback_font https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallback_font

mixmastamyk 10y ago

Symbola is a good one: http://users.teilar.gr/~g1951d/ http://users.teilar.gr/~g1951d/