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nycticoraxyesterday at 9:37 PM5 repliesview on HN

Shouldn't the first sentence on that website describe what GNU Unifont actually is? I guess it's a single copyleft font designed to have coverage of all (or nearly all?) unicode code points?


Replies

adrian_byesterday at 9:53 PM

Well, the second and the third sentence describe very precisely what Unifont is:

"This page contains the latest release of GNU Unifont, with glyphs for every printable code point in the Unicode Basic Multilingual Plane (BMP). The BMP occupies the first 65,536 code points of the Unicode space, denoted as U+0000..U+FFFF."

This is suitable as a last resort font, which should display any character for which no match was found in the other available fonts.

This is normally preferable to a last resort font that just displays the number of a character not available in your preferred fonts.

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hnfongyesterday at 10:11 PM

Note that "nearly all" isn't "all". I have some side project that require rendering of very uncommon CJK characters, and Unifont does not display them as expected. (For that project, I used https://kamichikoichi.github.io/jigmo/ which was the font that was most complete in terms of CJK glyphs )

Unifont seems to have about the same glyph coverage as my system default CJK font (unfortunately I don't know what it is).

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jayde2767yesterday at 10:19 PM

I was also confused, until I clicked “Home” and realized the link was not to the landing page.

Suppaflytoday at 4:36 AM

>Shouldn't the first sentence on that website describe what GNU Unifont actually is?

Tons of these open source projects have the same issue.

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IvyMikeyesterday at 9:47 PM

> GNU Unifont is part of the GNU Project. This page contains the latest release of GNU Unifont, with glyphs for every printable code point in the Unicode Basic Multilingual Plane (BMP)

I mean that's pretty close no?

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