Last Resort Font
github.com
github.com
* The repository code is 8 GIF files, not actually a font per se, nor even the source code for one (despite the name of the ZIP archive). The only actual font here is a binary file in an asset attached to a release tag, and it's only provided in one font format.
* Not all systems will work with this, as the idea of font fallback is not universal. The built-in terminal emulators in the FreeBSD kernel and in Linux only load one font at any given time. (I've written a user-space terminal emulator with the goal of providing a user-space workalike for those terminal emulators, which does have font fallback mechanisms, but kernel built-in terminal emulators forego the ability to have multiple fonts and a lot of other things for obvious reasons.)
* 200 by 200 is excessive for some uses. Not everything is a GUI program talking to a display server with a font manager on the side. The font tools for Linux's built-in terminal emulator limit glyph bitmaps to 32 by 32, for example. (https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/574583/5132)
* Life gets even more fun when one has to deal with the ("East Asian") widths of undefined code points. (-:
And these GIFs are roughly the same sizes as the supposedly extracted glyphs at https://github.com/altmind/AAPL-last-resort-glyphs .
Nothing this detailed will fit into 32 by 32 , vector-based or no. There simply aren't enough pixels for the words and numbers on the borders. Also notice that the significanty smaller "last resort glyphs" at http://unicode.org/charts/lastresort.html are not the same as what is purportedly in this font.
NOTE: The sources and build scripts may be added after Unicode Version 14.0.0 has been released (2021), and as time and resources permit.
So this repo doesn't have the source currently, despite what it may say earlier in the readme. I'm assuming the TTF file in the release is the actual font, and the "Source code" zip is just an automatic archive of what's currently in the repository.
I am a native Sinhalese (that ක is from it), and there aren't enough web fonts that cover those glyphs. If the system fonts don't cover those glyphs (Windows, Linux, and MacOS versions do, but many feature phones, treadmill browsers, etc don't). I'd love to see this font (which appears to be only sub 500kb) instead of those ugly boxes that don't convey any information whatsoever.
But, nope, not a metaphor, an actual treadmill.
How are noto fonts distributed? I hope no website on this planet sends you a 12 MiB font file for some fallback purposes.
On PC? Package managers, search for "noto-fonts" here[1], I installed them a year ago. If you want the full set it'll be a 200+ MiB download.
[1] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/typography/opentype/spec/cm...
Edit: Ah, I see, they use more fonts for higher points - but haven't covered everything yet? Aren't there already font families that cover everything? I was under the impression that Source Sans Pro does.
The idea is that if you are working on some software that produces or works with Unicode, you can see at a glance what type of character you have (if no other font provided a glyph), or if the codepoint is private-use, non-character, or not assigned yet.
It is huge though, like 13mb for a font is a lot.
https://github.com/googlefonts/noto-fonts
Neither of our posts have much to do with the article, though, which is a collection of marks to display what script family a missing character belongs to, when a font for that script is missing. This has the advantage of being much smaller, while still at least telling the user what sort of font to look for to decode the content.
It appears Noto isn't complete (nor is Unifont), which surprised me when I checked it. I can't recall ever seeing text which wasn't rendered by it in the wild.
Unifont itself covers only the BMP. There are a couple of supplements which go past that, which I wasn't aware of.
On another note, I do not know why you were down voted. You asked a valid question.
[0] https://docs.github.com/en/free-pro-team@latest/github/site-...
The Last Resort glyphs were drawn by Apple Inc. and Michael Everson of Evertype.
Why? Isn't the obvious way to just use "sans-serif" and let the system fallback to whatever the system font is? What if some Windows users install "Roboto" on their OS, in this case?
(I have this question with any of these"system font stacks" for a long time.)
Not really, I think it just means "sans serif". On iOS and Android, it will fallback to the default system font fine.
On Windows (and maybe MacOS, but I never use it), it will likely fallback to Arial because that's most of browsers default to [1], which is one layer before the system one.
[1]: https://i.imgur.com/bmVRwg0.png
However, users can always change this default font in browser setting [1] to whatever they want.
And I think this is a superior approach (just use "sans serif") than typical "system font stack" because
1) Users not necessarily want the same font for system UI and web page. I knew I don't because Segoe UI is too bulky. Anyway, If they do, they can always just set so in their browsers.
2) it's not hard-coded. What if an Android user changed their system front from Roboto to something else? Now whole premise "consistent look and feel" breaks down by having the hard-coded "Roboto" in your website's CSS.
3) The users still get the consistent look across all the websites that use such rule. And even better, they can control what exactly (back to point 1).
This is for those situations where you’ve got a stream of Unicode coming in and there’s some sort of weird behavior you’re trying to figure out due to some glyph that’s not otherwise representable, ie, is that end-of-line a carriage-return, a new-line, is there a space afterwards, and did that program just include a null-character as record delimiter before the new-line??? That sort of thing.