Unicode symbols and OS/browser font support - unicode

There are so many wonderful unicode symbols. This is amazing.
But they are all useless if I can't know if my user's font support them.
How can I find that out?
Can I track whether a user's font support a unicode symbol?
Any ways to have some kind of fallback? (If this unicode symbol isn't supported then show this other unicode symbol.)
Are there any OS/browser support references out there? (I've already extensively searched for such reference without any luck so far.)
What's your strategy to decide whether to use a unicode symbol?
I would love to use more of these lovely unicode symbols.
===Edit===
For example: I want to use the unicode "U+2605 ★ BLACK STAR" in my project's readme.md on GitHub. How can I know whether this unicode symbol will correctly be displayed?


If only someone would run this test to on all OS/browser and provide a compatibility table, that would be so awesome..
Modern browsers can display pretty much any character as long as the user has a font installed that includes it. So your question comes down to:
Which fonts are bundled with every major OS, and which characters do those fonts support?
Well, I have created a tool that presents exactly that information.
This may have been overkill, since it is pretty easy to just #font-face include FontAwesome, IonIcons, or a similar font or symbol set that you know includes your desired characters. You could even download and include individual SVGs if you're only talking about a couple of symbols.
But if you want to save yourself an external dependency and network request while also benefiting from the easy CSS styling of plain text, this is your solution!
If it turns out you want to use a character that is not widely supported, I include the name of which free Google Noto font you can <link> or #font-face embed. There's also a browser to look through whole Unicode blocks at a time.
Anyway, take a look at Unicompat.com and see if it is what you're looking for. It's very much in beta, so apologies if anything is creaky.


https://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/font/index.htm
To determine whether a user's font supports a specific unicode symbol, you can check if it is part of the font's character set.
For fallback, you can use a different unicode symbol that is likely to be supported by most fonts, or specify a fallback font that has wider support for unicode symbols.
There is no one-size-fits-all reference for unicode support across all operating systems and browsers, as it depends on the specific font being used. However, you can check if a unicode symbol is part of the Unicode Standard, which provides a comprehensive list of defined characters and their encoding.
Personally i like this website for check http://www.alanwood.net/unicode/cjk_compatibility.html

Related

Using OpenType features with ImageMagick or GraphicsMagick

Does anyone know if it's possible to use OpenType features in ImageMagick or GraphicsMagick? Specifically, I'm looking to use glyphs that are not assigned to Unicode points (glyphs are sometimes placed outside of the Unicode range, since they are intended to act as embellishments to other characters). In OpenType-aware desktop applications, you would usually need to open a glyph table and select the glyph manually; I'm not sure how you would do this using ImageMagick.

I'm afraid, such advanced (and also: somehow obscure) OTF features are NOT (yet) supported by ImageMagick -- at least there's nothing in the available documentation (I don't know about GraphicsMagick).
But your best option to get a definitive, authoritative answer from the developers themselves is: register here and ask again on the official ImageMagick Users list.

If I include the unicode "eject" symbol in my web app UI, what are the compatibility risks?

In short, how advanced is unicode support in browsers and operating systems?

Unicode support is, in general, rather widespread. The main problem here is probably that most fonts don’t contain the EJECT SYMBOL character. According to the font support page at fileformat.info, the character exists only in a small set of fonts, none of which is probably shipped with an operating system or other commonly used software. So the user would need find, download, and install a font that contains the character, unless you use font embedding.

Tools for manual translation of Constants/Messages .properties files

I'm looking for some tools that could be used by human translators during the process of translating our GWT application into other languages.
Currently, we have the English version of .properties files containing constants and messages, and need create the files for other languages. This tool should be easy to use, so even non-IT-lover can master it.
Or, do you suggest other method for translation of the texts?
I heard the "community" approach becomes quite popular, by that I mean that one uploads his texts to some (?) forum, and the community there creates the translations into other language - but as I said, I don't know much about this
Are there any online platforms for this purpose?
any other ideas?

See my SO answer for VB 6 source code, speech text is in french want to translate to english. The same answer works if you replace the computer langauge "VB6" by "JavaScript".

complete, monospaced Unicode font? [closed]

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I'm looking for a good programming font that lets me add comments and string literals in Unicode, usually Japanese and Chinese along with some Latin and Cyrillic languages.
So far the situation seems to be "complete, monospace, free, pick 2" and Google is failing me with this (maybe because there are no good ones?).
The best I found is Arial Unicode but it's not monospace, which is a big nuisance for me and the editors I use. Not to mention Python indentation when I'm coding Python.
(Links, edits are welcome)

Unicode is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly hugely mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you might think it's a long way down the codepage to ü, but that's just peanuts to Unicode.
I really doubt there's any font in the world (monospaced or not) that has "complete" Unicode. The best you can do is find a few monospaced fonts that, together, cover the space you're interested in, and make sure your editor is set up to use them.

The best I've found is DejaVu Sans Mono which is a Unicode expansion of Bitstream's Vera Sans Mono.
I'm not sure there are any 'complete' fonts, so I think you'll have to deal with a patchwork of fonts.

GNU Unifont is a monospaced, bitmapped font with complete coverage of the Basic Multilingual Plane as defined in Unicode 5.1. It is also avaiable in True Type format.

How about Consolas? Should be lying around on most windows boxes by now.
If not it can be downloaded here:
http://www.microsoft.com/down...lang=en
It does look ugly without ClearType enabled though.

Before Consolas, I always used Andale Mono as my programmer font. There's a free download available.

I'm trying to answer this question for myself, for use in Eclipse editor.
MS ゴシック (MS Gothic) is what I'm currently trying, and that seems to be pretty good for the Japanese characters I'm dealing with. Included in Windows since 2000.

One could be constructed from the Unicode Consortium's published CodeCharts.pdf by font extraction via FontForge. However:
Legal issues would be a serious consideration.
The extracted fonts do not align their characters to unicode code points, but rather place them at various points sometimes in order, sometimes haphazardly. Remapping them is a chore (but orders of magnitude easier than creating a font from scratch).
Character combining, etc., logic is complex (I'd personally prefer a dumb uncombined font, with one visual position per codepoint, and display them just like on the codepages).

GNU Unifont does indeed have the complete Unicode BMP. unfortunately the UTF8 map has about 16 times as many characters, including some CJK extensions. My advice is to download Unifont and add the other characters you need by hand or by copying them from another font.

Actually I find monospaced fonts to be a nuisance when I have to read them so I use Tahoma or even Georgia for my source code. I have a very verbose coding style (an instance of type AstractModemConnector is named abstractModemConnector) so my source code looks almost like English and is perfectly readable with a proportional font.

InstallShield2009 Unicode Support

Our installation program is written using InstallShield2009, and as part of certification requirements we have to support Unicode throughout.
The application itself is .NET, so supports Unicode natively, however on testing our installation with a Chinese character set we can see problems thrown up by InstallShield dialogs.
Having done a quick google, I found one related post whereby someone has deemed there is no unicode support in IS2008.
I have also emailed Acresso directly, but being the caring developer I am, thought I'd post the question here for future reference, in case anyone else has the same problem.
If anyone has encountered this problem in the past, any help would be appreciated. Thanks.

Turns out that IS2009 does NOT fully support Unicode, as it cannot handle paths containing (amongst others) Japanese characters.