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Another project is gnu unifont[1], which aims to provide a bitmapped font that covers unicode completely. Supports unicode 13 (the latest version). 1. https:/

Another project is gnu unifont[1], which aims to provide a bitmapped font that covers unicode completely. Supports unicode 13 (the latest version). 1. https://savannah.gnu.org/projects/unifont https://savannah.gnu.org/projects/unifont

happytoexplain 6y ago
It says it only covers the BMP, which aligns with my expectations that common font formats can't contain enough characters to define all printable characters in Unicode. Edit: Ah, I see, they use more fonts for higher points - but haven't covered everything yet? Aren't there already font families that cover everything? I was under the impression that Source Sans Pro does.
_-___________-_ 6y ago
Note the different goals of unifont and Last Resort Font. Last Resort Font is intended to provide descriptive glyphs for all codepoints, even for those that are non-characters (which would presumably be out of scope for unifont), and to distinguish between private-use and unassigned codepoints, which would all simply be missing glyphs in something like unifont. The idea is that if you are working on some software that produces or works with Unicode, you can see at a glance what type of character you have (if no other font provided a glyph), or if the codepoint is private-use, non-character, or not assigned yet.
swiley 6y ago
I love unifont! Not only will you pretty much never see tofu boxes with it but (IMO) their emoji graphics are better than most. I think it might violate the standard but I really hate having emojis rendered with a different color than the surrounding text. And personally I prefer the bitmap style for graphics even if text itself is better as vectors (which is the way the font is intended to be used anyway.) It is huge though, like 13mb for a font is a lot.
samatman 6y ago
To my taste Google's Noto project is the better choice for most purposes, since they're vector, and cover more than just the BMP. I also happen to think they look better. https://github.com/googlefonts/noto-fonts https://github.com/googlefonts/noto-fonts Neither of our posts have much to do with the article, though, which is a collection of marks to display what script family a missing character belongs to, when a font for that script is missing. This has the advantage of being much smaller, while still at least telling the user what sort of font to look for to decode the content.
- yorwba 6y ago
  Unifont covers all of the BMP (and more), so it's impossible for any other font to cover more of it. But Noto has nicer glyphs for the parts it does cover, so it's better to use Unifont as the fallback for characters not in Noto instead of the other way around.
  - samatman 6y ago
    Ah, that was a typo, which I've corrected. It appears Noto isn't complete (nor is Unifont), which surprised me when I checked it. I can't recall ever seeing text which wasn't rendered by it in the wild. Unifont itself covers only the BMP. There are a couple of supplements which go past that, which I wasn't aware of.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]

happytoexplain 6y ago

It says it only covers the BMP, which aligns with my expectations that common font formats can't contain enough characters to define all printable characters in Unicode. Edit: Ah, I see, they use more fonts for higher points - but haven't covered everything yet? Aren't there already font families that cover everything? I was under the impression that Source Sans Pro does.

_-___________-_ 6y ago

Note the different goals of unifont and Last Resort Font. Last Resort Font is intended to provide descriptive glyphs for all codepoints, even for those that are non-characters (which would presumably be out of scope for unifont), and to distinguish between private-use and unassigned codepoints, which would all simply be missing glyphs in something like unifont. The idea is that if you are working on some software that produces or works with Unicode, you can see at a glance what type of character you have (if no other font provided a glyph), or if the codepoint is private-use, non-character, or not assigned yet.

swiley 6y ago

I love unifont! Not only will you pretty much never see tofu boxes with it but (IMO) their emoji graphics are better than most. I think it might violate the standard but I really hate having emojis rendered with a different color than the surrounding text. And personally I prefer the bitmap style for graphics even if text itself is better as vectors (which is the way the font is intended to be used anyway.) It is huge though, like 13mb for a font is a lot.

samatman 6y ago

To my taste Google's Noto project is the better choice for most purposes, since they're vector, and cover more than just the BMP. I also happen to think they look better. https://github.com/googlefonts/noto-fonts https://github.com/googlefonts/noto-fonts Neither of our posts have much to do with the article, though, which is a collection of marks to display what script family a missing character belongs to, when a font for that script is missing. This has the advantage of being much smaller, while still at least telling the user what sort of font to look for to decode the content.

yorwba 6y ago
Unifont covers all of the BMP (and more), so it's impossible for any other font to cover more of it. But Noto has nicer glyphs for the parts it does cover, so it's better to use Unifont as the fallback for characters not in Noto instead of the other way around.
- samatman 6y ago
  Ah, that was a typo, which I've corrected. It appears Noto isn't complete (nor is Unifont), which surprised me when I checked it. I can't recall ever seeing text which wasn't rendered by it in the wild. Unifont itself covers only the BMP. There are a couple of supplements which go past that, which I wasn't aware of.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]