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GNU Unifont Glyphs

unifoundry.com

81 pointsedent20 comments

Why has all the `0` been replaced with `Ø`?

As a Dane, I'm sligthly offended.

its one of two or three accepted solutions to the 0O problem

It's not really a solution, as it creates the 0Ø problem.

I haven't checked Unifont but generally, zero with a slash has the slash only on the inside of the zero, whereas o with a slash, as you, being danish, know, but others might not, has the slash extending beyond each side. If Unifont has the slash going outside, then I agree with you, that is offensive, but if it does not, then it's fine.

What are the others?

zero with a dot in middle or very wide O narrow 0 (which is how proportional fonts deal with it) although unless it's quite exaggerated it's still not always obvious if you encounter one but not the other.

Some fonts have the slash through the zero is closer to horizontal and goes through just above to just below the x height. Orthographers can argue amongst themselves whether that is a distinct approach or just a variation of the /.

Because the 'O0' confusion is more common than the 'Ø0' confusion, probably.

I personally prefer having the zero glyph with a slash only on the inside (i.e. not protruding), or with a dot on the inside, but whatever.

As an english speaking American, learning danish, I agree it is a little confusing, the zero versus Ø problem. but it is also confusing to see 0 and O written when the zero has no slash. I think maybe our zero needs a less ambiguous distinguishing feature. I can easily discern 0 and Ø but I think it may be that I am so used to seeing 0 with a slash.

I have unifont installed on Linux. Ironically, when I set Firefox to disallow sites to choose their own fonts, and set unifont as my default, the unifoundry site text looks terrible, like the old days. When I allow sites to choose their own, unifoundry looks fine. And when I disallow, and use Verdana, unifoundry looks fine.

Similar with HN.

I'm guessing one of the goals of unifont is that I never see a box where I should see a glyph. Is there a way to fall back to unifont? Is it a per app choice?

Unifont is at its heart a bitmapped font. Maybe that explains why you see it as horrible.

And yes in most modern operating systems font substitution is automatic, so indeed you will not see a box instead of a glyph. However that depends on applications using the right system API for drawing text.

One of the design choices of Unifont is to trade quality for coverage:

"Unifont is a creation of Roman Czyborra, who in 1998 lamented that seven years after Unicode's first release, there was still no single font that could display all Unicode characters. He suggested that if expectations of font quality were lowered to that of a bitmapped font, achieving coverage of Unicode would be easier."

So, if you render everything with it, it won't be very pretty. But it makes a great fall back option for missing glyphs.

source: https://savannah.gnu.org/projects/unifont

I know with APL is, but what is a console frame buffer font?

It's referring to a kind of display driver in which frames are rendered as bitmaps into memory then that bitmap will be rendered to a screen. Fonts for such drivers are, AFAIK, always bitmap fonts.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_framebuffer

console frame buffer font is just a fancy way of saying pixel font.

console means that it is to be used with a console [1] or terminal emulator[2]. Traditionally terminal emulators used bitmap fonts, but modern versions support vector fonts as well. frame buffer [3] just means that it is a bitmap font like the ones used in traditional frame buffer consoles.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_console

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terminal_emulator

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Framebuffer

A bitmap font that can be used in the Linux console.

Looks very similar to these fonts, at least for the latin-1 part, but more complete and with more restrictive license: https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ucs-fonts.html

What are the implications of a GPL'd font? In particular, does merely using it within a program invoke the copyleft requirements? Or does that fall under the document use exception per the webpage?

Small typo in the title: should probably be GNU (not GUN).

The submitted title was “GNU Unifont updated to Unicode version 9”, which was more informative and not misleading. Often I don’t know why the titles are changed.

The titles are changed to be like the title is in the link. This is to prevent biasing by submitters. Unfortunately, the mods have to be quite ruthless to keep it fair and to avoid adding their own bias.

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