4 ms·
> How much work would it be to implement your own font of the entire unicode set? Or is that not actually a thing and fonts implement as-desired subsets? You c
by lifthrasiir 4y ago
> How much work would it be to implement your own font of the entire unicode set? Or is that not actually a thing and fonts implement as-desired subsets?
You can't, and you are not expected to do so. You are limited by OpenType limit (65,535 glyphs), various shaping rules that possibly increase the number of required glyphs, and lack of local or historical typographic convention. Your best bet is either to recruit a large number of experts (e.g. Google Noto fonts) or to significantly sacrifice quality (e.g. GNU Unifont).
- Waterluvian 4y agoI wasn’t aware of the 2^16 limitation. Thank you for the notes!
- poizan42 4y agoA single OpenType font file is limited to 65,535 glyphs. Nothing stops your font from being implemented as a series of .otf files (besides what people think of as a "font" when it comes to usage on computers). But yes, time constraints are the limiting factor. I don't think anyone is going to dedicate their entire life to making a single font.
- lifthrasiir 4y agoWhile you are right that one logical font can consist of multiple font files (or possibly a OpenType collection), this constraint does affect most typical fonts, and in particular wide-coverage CJK fonts already hit this limit. Fonts supporting only one of Chinese, Japanese and Korean don't need that many glyphs, and probably even two of them will be okay, but fonts with all three sets of glyphs won't. It is therefore common to provide three versions of fonts, all differently named.
- userbinator 4y agoYou could also go the shady route and just make a font out of all the "reference character sheets" that the Unicode site has. Probably not legal and the result would not be pleasant to read, but that's one way to create a font containing all of Unicode.