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Comment by phkahler | Hacker News Reader

We use GNU Unifont in Solvespace for the text window/property browser. It's built right into the executable. This turned out to be amazingly useful. Some people have CJK stuff in their designs and it "just works" on all platforms. I was also looking into hole annotations in CAD and was pleased to see the symbols for counter-bore and counter-sink are both already there in unifont.

You can see unifont in the experimental web version here: https://cad.apps.dgramop.xyz/

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Wow, the web version is neat in its simplicity! Thank you for the work on Solvespace. It's far and away my favorite MCAD program and always my first go-to when I need to crank out a quick fixture to test PCBs. It's really so pleasant and easy to work with as long as my geometry is relatively basic (which it almost always is given my limited scope of work with mechanical design). I'm sorry I don't have any comments on the relevant topic of the fonts, just was excited to see Solvespace mentioned.

+1; thanks from another satisfied user. I have an annual SOLIDWORKS plan, but SolveSpace is my go-to for quick stuff. It makes CAD fun. There is a clarity of design behind the software that gives it a zen-like feel.

That's such a cool effect from just the choice of font. (Though I guess there are countless human hours spent on unifont and unicode as a whole)

But I love the idea that even if your bronze age CAD guy wrote all the solid names in Linear A, no problem!

That web version is very neat. Solvespace is by far my favorite cad, it ls hard to explain exactly why because it really is quite limited compared to other cad packages, but I think it is mainly because of the fluidity and shear joy of operation while expressing constraints.

One of these days I need to dive into the code and figure out a replacement for the modal "can not create constraint" dialogs as those are the worst part of the whole experience.

I'm curious, have you had this support checked by a native speaker of Chinese/Japanese/Korean? Due to Han unification (Unicode's biggest mistake) many code points require different glyphs depending on the target language, but Unifont only has a single glyph per code point--it's impossible for the one glyph to be correct in all CJK languages. It seems more likely that this "kinda works" for CJK but renders incorrect glyphs some of the time.

This is awesome!

(Just so you know, RTL doesn't work. حبيبي comes out as ي ب ي ب ح. See https://imgur.com/a/HiXxqZ2 )

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