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.
Related
I'm making a virtual computer with a custom font and programming environment (Mini Micro), all Unicode based. I have need for a few custom glyphs in my environment. I know about the Private Use Areas, but I'm wondering about the "control" code points at U+0080 through U+009F. I can't find any documentation on what these points are for beyond "control".
Would it be a gross abuse of Unicode to tuck a few of my custom glyphs in there? What would be a proper use of them?
Wikipedia lists their meaning. You get 2 of them for your use, U+0091 and U+0092.
The 0x80 - 0x9F range you referto to is generally called the C1 control characters. Like other control codes, the C1s are for code extension, and by their very nature, some are generally left open for further expansion and thus have only vague standardization.
The original and most comprehensive reference is probably ECMA-48 - up to the Fifth Edition in June 1991. (The link takes you to a free download in PDF format.)
For additional glyphs, C1 codes would not be appropriate. In effect, the whole idea of control codes is that they are the special case of non-graphical codes.
UNICODE has continued to evolve, with an emoji block that has a lot of "characters" you might not expect. Let's try one: 💎 it is officially called the GemStone Emoji. I used this copy/paste website to insert it, you might look to see if something you can use has been standardized in the Emoji code block.
One of the interesting things about the emoji characters is that they are double-wide, even in a fixed-width font.
Microsoft uses them for smart quotes the Euro and a few other symbols in its latin-1 extension cp1252. As this character encoding is frequently reported as latin-1 using these code points for other uses can cause problems, especially as latin-1 is supposed to be code point equivalent to Unicode. This Wikipedia page gives some history and the meanings of these control characters.
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.
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!
Does anyone knows how to generate Chinese characters using Postscript or related tools? I'd like to use unicode to represent Chinese characters but it seems that Postscript doesn't support unicode, yet. In addition, I'd like to specify several fonts to generate the same character.
Thus, I have two questions:
1. how to use unicode in Postscript? Or how to enumerate Chinese Character set in the postscript way?
2. How to specify the fonts configurations using Postscript?
At last, in case postscript cannot do this job, what tools should I turn to for my purpose?
Thank you very much!
-Jin
In Adobe's official PostScript language specification there is no specific support for Unicode fonts. (And this is the final version of the spec for PS Level 3, valid since its publication in 1999 -- PostScript as a language is no longer developed...)
However, PostScript supports (since Level 2) multi-byte fonts (2-, 3- and 4-bytes) in a generic way (see 'CID'). All PostScript fonts need an "encoding": an encoding basically is a table telling at which index position of a font which glyph description for a given character can be found. So while there are no Unicode fonts as such, there are multi-byte CID fonts which provide ranged subsets of Unicode.
Also, there are no freely re-distributable CMaps. (A CMap .) If you need a CMap, you have to derive it from the Windows codepage and the matching Adobe CMap.
If you just look for a "super-simple" method to use Unicode text strings with no need of checking for ranges, language etc.: sorry to disappoint you. There is no way. That would be a pipe dream.
Have a look at CID-keyed fonts instead. These are designed to include a large number of glyphs. (Page 364ff in PLRM)
Update: Linked to the correct page with CID font description.
Does Unicode store stroke count information about Chinese, Japanese, or other stroke-based characters?
A little googling came up with Unihan.zip, a file published by the Unicode Consortium which contains several text files including Unihan_RadicalStrokeCounts.txt which may be what you want. There is also an online Unihan Database Lookup based on this data.
In Python there is a library for that:
>>> from cjklib.characterlookup import CharacterLookup
>>> cjk = CharacterLookup('C')
>>> cjk.getStrokeCount(u'æ—¥')
4
Disclaimer: I wrote it
You mean, is it encoded somehow in the actual code point? No. There may well be a table somewhere you can find on the net (or create one) but it's not part of the Unicode mandate to store this sort of metadata.
If you want to do character recognition goggle HanziDict.
Also take a look at the Unihan data site:
http://www.unicode.org/charts/unihanrsindex.html
You can look up stroke count and then get character info. You might be able to build your own look up.
UILocalizedIndexedCollation can be a total solution.
https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/documentation/iPhone/Reference/UILocalizedIndexedCollation_Class/UILocalizedIndexedCollation.html