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Which Unicode characters can you depend on?

by ehamberg on 4/11/13, 8:27 PM with 15 comments

• by fafner on 4/11/13, 9:12 PM

  I wish there were a great monospace font with extensive Unicode symbol support. DejaVu seems to support a lot of math symbols. But it's far from being perfect.

  My favourite fonts Inconsolata and Adobe Source Proc support barely anything beyond latin1. So I usually end up with some ugly font mix due to fallback.

  (Of course if you want all of Unicode and hate yourself there is GNU Unifont. edit: Just checked and Unifont only supports all of BMP.)

• by mixmastamyk on 4/11/13, 9:18 PM

  I'm not sure the intersection is necessary. I believe that as long as a character is included in any font on the system it will get shown (in web browsers at least).

  It may not be the case on mobile, but it appears to work this way on Windows and Linux.

• by vorg on 4/11/13, 9:59 PM

  Some of those characters in Cook's blog didn't render in Chrome. Perhaps Chrome should ship with a default font that renders every Unicode character!

• by ctdonath on 4/12/13, 1:43 AM

  Didn't Hofsteader have some tools for mapping characters into the essential aesthetic form of a font? Could we at least get approximations of all Unicode characters (from a simple base font) into all typefaces installed on a system? (Or have I just been subjected to too much Doc McStuffins this evening?)

• by eridius on 4/11/13, 9:14 PM

  Droid Sans is a font for Android. How exactly is that a "common font"? I mean, there's a lot of Android users out there, but I would have to assume "common font" means fonts that are available on multiple different platforms.

• by k7lim on 4/11/13, 10:44 PM

  ಠ_ಠ