In order to detect if font contains some particular character in javascript I've decided that the best way is to have fallback font where ALL unicode characters have exactly ZERO width spaces. This font would allow me to easily check existing of himself, and existing of any character in any other font (except for conrtol characters). I would just check width of character.
Do you know if such font already exists?
It should be very simple to make it with FontForge and scripting. But it is hard for me to get into FontForge and Unicode docs. If someone is fluent in FontForge, could you teach me, or just make this kind of font. I assume it is, what, like 50 script lines on Python?
https://github.com/adobe-fonts/adobe-blank – answered by Mike 'Pomax' Kamermans
Very nice. Just 7kb for woff version! My own attempts to make such a font myself in FontForge gave about 1mb for 0000-1ffff unicode range.
Related
There are several unicode relevant questions has been confusing me for some time.
For these reasons as follow I think the unicode characters are existed on disk.
Execute echo "\u6211" in terminal, it will print the glyph corresponding to the unicode code point U+6211.
There's a concept of UCD (unicode character database), and We can download it's latest version. UCD latest
Some new version unicode characters like latest emojis can not display on my mac until I upgrade macOS version.
So if the unicode characters does existed on the disk , then ：
Where is it ?
How can I upgrade it ?
What's the process of mapping the unicode code point to a glyph ?
If I use a specific font, then what's the process of mapping the unicode code point to a glyph ?
If not, then what's the process of mapping the unicode code point to a glyph ?
It will very appreciated if someone could shed light on these problems.
Execute echo "\u6211" in terminal, it will print the glyph corresponding to the unicode code point U+6211.
That's echo -e in bash.
› echo "\u6211"
\u6211
› echo -e "\u6211"
我
Where is it ?
In the font file.
Some new version unicode characters like latest emojis can not display on my mac until I upgrade macOS version.
How can I upgrade it ?
Installing/upgrading a suitable font with the emojis should be enough. I don't have macOS, so I cannot verify this.
I use "Noto Color Emoji" version 2.011/20180424, it works fine.
What's the process of mapping the unicode code point to a glyph ?
The application (e.g. text editor) provides the font rendering subsystem (Quartz? on macOS) with Unicode text and a font name. The font renderer analyses the codepoints of the text and decides whether this is simple text (e.g. Latin, Chinese, stand-alone emojis) or complex text (e.g. Latin with many marks, Thai, Arabic, emojis with zero-width joiners). The renderer finds the corresponding outlines in the font file. If the file does not have the required glyph, the renderer may use a similar font, or use a configured fallback font for a poor substitute (white box, black question mark etc.). Then the outlines undergo shaping to compose a complex glyph and line-breaking. Finally, the font renderer hands off the result to the display system.
Apart from the shaping, very little of this has to do with Unicode or encoding. Font rendering already used to work that way before Unicode existed, of course font files and rendering was much simpler 30 years ago. Encoding only matters when someone wants to load or save text from an application.
Summary: investigate
Truetype/Opentype font editing software so you can see what's contained in the files
font renderers, on Linux look at the libraries pango and freetype.
Generally speaking, operating system components that use text use the Unicode character set. In particular, font files use the Unicode character set. But, not all font files support all the Unicode codepoints.
When a codepoint is not supported by one font, the system might fallback to another that does. This is particularly true of web browsers. But ultimately if the codepoint is not supported, an unfilled rectangle is rendered. (There is no character for that because it's not a character. In fact, if you were able to copy and paste it as text, it should be the original character that couldn't be rendered.)
In web development, the web page can either supply or give the location of fonts that should work for the codepoints it uses.
Other programs typically use the operating system's rendering facilities and therefore the fonts available through it. How to install a font in an operating system is not a programming question (unless you are including a font in an installer for your program). For more information on that, you could see if the question fits with the Ask Different (Apple) Stack Exchange site.
Pretty much as the title says. Rendering all of the unicode format correctly what with composite characters and characters that affect other characters and ligatures is really hard, I understand that. We have fonts that seem to be designed for maximum Unicode symbol support(Symbola, Code2001, others) and specialized fonts for certain planes or character ranges(BabelStone Han, others).
I don't know much about the underlying technical details for fonts. Is there a maximum size? Is it a copyright problem? Is essentially redrawing all ~110,000 extant glyphs too hard? I understand style concerns, but why not fall back to a 'default' font that had glyphs for everything? They're on unicode.org, redrawing them all would be pretty hard work but then you'd have a guaranteed fallback font for everything. If you got rights to some pre-existing fonts you could just composite them and that should help a lot. Such a font would be a great help to humanity and I can't see a good technical reason why it doesn't exist or at least an open-source effort to create it, so I presume an invisible-to-me reason why it can't be done.
What is that reason?
"Why would you even want that?" questions aside, from a programming perspective there's a very simple reason: the OpenType spec only affords an addressable glyph index space of one USHORT, so one font can only support 16 bits worth of glyphs identifiers, or 65,536 glyphs max. (And note the terminology: a "glyph" is not the same as a "character" or "letter")
The current version of Unicode, v8 as of this answer, contains 120,737 assigned code points, or almost twice as many as fit in a modern font (2021 edit: v13 upped this number to 143,859). In fact, Unicode hasn't been able to fit in a modern OpenType font since 2001, with the release of Unicode 3.1, which upped the number of code points from 49,259 to 94,205.
"So what about font collections?" I hear you ask. Why not use multiple fonts and support all unicode that way? Well now, you've just described Adobe's Sans Pro, and Google's Noto (which are the same font).
As for the "how hard can it be": a uniform style for all glyphs in Unicode, across 129 established written scripts on this planet, each with their own typesetting rules? Incredibly hard. You may think fonts are just files with pictures for letters, and someone types a letter, that picture shows up: that is not how fonts work, and isn't how fonts have worked since the late 1980's.
Modern fonts are the typographic equivalent of a game ROM: sure, it's not much use without the hardware or software to run that ROM on, but all the things that actually matter are in the ROM. Similarly, modern fonts contain all the information for typesetting. Not just pictures, they contain the metadata, the metrics, the positioning and substitutions rules for arbitrary sequences, with separate rule sets for each written script that OpenType supports, mandatory and optional ligatures, language-specific character replacements for letters at the start/middle/final position in a word, or in isolation, character repositioning relative to arbitarily complex sequences of other characters either before or after it, arbitrarily complex sequence replacements with other arbitrarily complex sequences, possible bitmap fallbacks for small-point rendering, hinting instructions on how to properly rasterize vector graphics that are inherently not aligned to any particular pixel grid, and more. A modern font is a ridiculously complex application, that a font engine consults to figure out how to typeset sequences of code points.
Making a (set of) Unicode-encompassing font(s) that looks good for all contexts is a vast team effort.
So: "Why isn't there a font that contains all Unicode glyphs?", because that's been technically impossible since 2001. We can, and do, make font families that cover all of Unicode, but with 129 different scripts all with their own typesetting rules, it's a lot of work, and almost (almost) not worth the effort compared to only covering a subset of all languages.
And as for this:
Such a font would be a great help to humanity and I can't see a good technical reason why it doesn't exist or at least an open-source effort to create it, so I presume an invisible-to-me reason why it can't be done.
Just because you didn't know about them, doesn't mean they don't exist, with millions of people who are familiar with them. They exist =)
They're even open source, go out and thank the people who made them!
There is GNU Unifont. It aims to contain all Unicode, except Apple Emoji.
You will probably find what you are looking for at the following links.
Unicode Character Table
HTML Character Entity References
Huge List of Unicode Symbols
List of Unicode Characters of Category “Other Symbol
This other is funny for particular character since you can draw what you search:
Unicode Character Recognition
Can't enter unicode character with Alt+ even with EnableHexNumpad
Basic Questions
Q: How many characters are in Unicode?
A: The short answer is that as of Version 13.0, the Unicode Standard contains 143,859 characters. The long answer is rather more complicated, because of all the different kinds of characters that people might be interested in counting.
Unicode font
A Unicode font is a computer font that maps glyphs to code points defined in the Unicode Standard. The vast majority of modern computer fonts use Unicode mappings, even those fonts which only include glyphs for a single writing system, or even only support the basic Latin alphabet.
Fonts which support a wide range of Unicode scripts and Unicode symbols are sometimes referred to as "pan-Unicode fonts", although as the maximum number of glyphs that can be defined in a TrueType font is restricted to 65,535, it is not possible for a single font to provide individual glyphs for all defined Unicode characters (143,859 characters, with Unicode 13.0).
...
No single "Unicode font" includes all the characters defined in the present revision of ISO 10646 (Unicode) standard, as more and more languages and characters are continually added to it, and common font formats cannot contain more than 65,535 glyphs (about half the number of characters encoded in Unicode).
As a result, font developers and foundries incorporate new characters in newer versions or revisions of a font, or in separate auxiliary fonts intended specifically for particular languages.
Enjoy!
I have an old program written in VB6.
I am trying to get it work right on Windows 8.1.
Everything works, except sending text in Hebrew to the printer.
The printer prints "???" instead of Hebrew characters.
It is obvious that this is an encoding problem, but I don't find a way to solve it.
The program works on Windows 7 without any problem!
the relevant code:
Printer.Font.Charset = 177 'Hebrew encoding
Printer.Print "<text in Hebrew>"
Printer.EndDoc
If someone has an advice, I will appreciate it a lot.
Thanks!
It usualy means the font used does not have those characters. Arial has stuff like גּוּלּ֧֧֧֯.
object.FontName [= font]
The FontName property syntax has these parts:
Part Description
object An object expression that evaluates to an object in the Applies To list.
font A string expression specifying the font name to use.
Remarks
The default for this property is determined by the system. Fonts available with Visual Basic vary depending on your system configuration, display devices, and printing devices. Font-related properties can be set only to values for which fonts exist.
In general, you should change FontName before setting size and style attributes with the FontSize, FontBold, FontItalic, FontStrikethru, and FontUnderline properties.
You might need to set the Language for non-Unicode programs to Hebrew. In Win 8 you do it like this.
I'm trying to use fonts from the Nitti Basic family for programming. These fonts are packaged as OpenType PostScript OTF files.
Its U+002D (HYPHEN-MINUS) glyph works well as a hyphen, but not so well as a minus.
For example, it doesn't line up with the horizontal bar of the plus sign.
On the other hand, Nitti's glyph for U+2212 (MINUS) is perfect as a minus (of course), and this is what I need when programming. It's not feasible for me to actually use codepoint U+2212; after all, U+002D is what you get when you press the minus sign on the keyboard and it's what programming languages use for subtraction.
So instead I'd like to steal the glyph from U+2212 and use it for U+002D, so that that character looks like a minus sign.
How can I do it?
Update: Yes, it is possible to use U+002D as a hyphen in source code.
As mentioned above, a minus sign is what I need.
I agree with Jukka, there are tools to do this.
However, please don't forget that a font is usually protected by very similar contracts as software. In this case the link you provided for example points to a legal document that reads (amongst much other):
"Except as permitted herein, you may not rename, modify, adapt,
translate, reverse engineer, decompile, disassemble, alter or
otherwise copy the Bold Monday Font Software."
Notice the fact that you're not permitted legally to change this font. If you read the rest of the agreement you'll see a lot of restrictions on the actual use of the font as well. Make sure you're not breaking your license by what you are doing...
For posterity, here's how to do it:
Obtain Adobe's AFDKO font tools and install them.
Put the OTF files into an empty directory.
Run ttx *.otf to convert the OTF files to TTX (XML).
Edit each TTX file in a text editor:
In the cmap section, change occurrences of hyphen to minus. This table maps characters to glyphs. Character U+002D was originally mapped to the hyphen glyph; this change maps it to the minus glyph.
Over the whole file, change ocurrences of NittiBasic to NittiBasicM and Nitti Basic to Nitti Basic M. This will distinguish the modified version of the font from the original once it's installed.
Rename the TTX files, replacing Nitti Basic with Nitti Basic M.
Run ttx -b *.ttx to convert the TTX files back to OTF.
Finally, install the newly-created OTF files.
Tools like FontForge can be used to edit a font in a simple manner.
Note that in programming, too, HYPHEN-MINUS has multiple uses: as a minus sign, but also (in some languages) as allowed in identifiers, as well as in comments, where it usually appears in the role of hyphen. In some uses, a HYPHEN glyph will look odd.
Does anybody know a set of typefaces that altogether cover the whole Unicode character range? we know that it is impossible to display all unicode characters using just one or two fonts. But probably, we can find a set of fonts using them the whole Unicode range could be displayed. Does anybody have any experience?
Thank you so much in advance.
One way to find such set of fonts is to look into Windows Font Linking. If you take a look at the registry key HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\FontLink\SystemLink you'll see fonts that "link" to cover the complete Unicode set.
as far as i know Arial Unicode is one of the full.
Everson Mono covers a large portion of the Unicode characters, and SIL International makes a lot of different fonts for minority languages.