> Unifont Limitations
> Unifont only stores one glyph per printable Unicode code point. This means that complex scripts with special forms for letter combinations including consonant combinations and floating vowel marks such as with Indic scripts (Devanagari, Bengali, Tamil, etc.) or letters that change shape depending upon their position in a word (Indic and Arabic scripts) will not render well in Unifont. In those cases, Unifont is only suitable as a font of last resort. Users wishing to properly render such complex scripts should use full OpenType fonts that faithfully display such alternate forms.
So if your intention when choosing unifont was to support all of Unicode, it would be good to make it not too difficult to add more fonts.
It's not just a matter of supporting more fonts. I need to support smarter fonts with ligatures and more. I think we could preserve the constraint of a single font and just make it smarter. But it'll take me some time to learn enough to do that.
E.g. you list Myanmar, where it's possible to construct something like င်္င္င္င္ငြေေေေေေေောာာာာာာာ, which has "nga" င, "asat" ်, "virama" ္ combined to put င်္ on the following consonant, which in this case is four "nga" င separated by three "virama" ္ to form a cluster င္င္င္င (Noto Sans Myanmar apparently supports stacking up to height 3, the fourth "nga" င awkwardly overlaps), then there's a "medial ra" ြ which puts a box around the preceding consonant without overlapping, then 8 copies of "e" ေ which should be rendered to the left of the consonant it follows and then 8 copies of "aa" ာ which attach to the right.
You're not going to encounter something crazy like this in the wild (in Burmese, there's at most one of each vowel sign on a consonant, and I don't think stacking four consonants is ever necessary) but it serves as a demonstration of the edge cases that a font needs to handle. The lookup tables end up getting quite large, which I think is one of the reasons Noto isn't usually used as one file with all scripts.
Tamil, however, doesn't have this property. Does Myanmar?
At the moment a single diacritic is the extent of my ambition.
Anyways, if you could get Tamil to work with a generic approach, I guess most of the edge cases for Myanmar would be covered by that as well. (Edit: seems like Tamil only has at most one diacritic, so it would have to be more general for Myanmar still.)
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FWIW, I ran across this the other day: "4x4 ASCII Font"
> Small fonts have always been fascinating to me, so I decided to make the smallest font possible, which turned out to be 4x4 pixels per character. The font covers the entire range of visible ASCII characters, and most are immediately recognizable.
https://simplifier.neocities.org/4x4.html
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For display from small machines I keep going back and forth between simple memory-mapped raster screens vs. emitting a stream of, say, SVG to an external "display processor" (following the "Wheel of Reincarnation": "On the Design of Display Processors" http://cva.stanford.edu/classes/cs99s/papers/myer-sutherland... )
Wish general computing was more customizable like that...
here are a few images showing the setup and sites using unifont. https://imgur.com/a/5gAZau3
1024x768 is more than reasonable. Almost luxurious in a "small"/"personal" computing context, but in a good way. I still use computers with that resolution sometimes.