Shouldn't the first sentence on that website describe what GNU Unifont actually is? I guess it's a single copyleft font designed to have coverage of all (or nearly all?) unicode code points?
"This page contains the latest release of GNU Unifont, with glyphs for every printable code point in the Unicode Basic Multilingual Plane (BMP). The BMP occupies the first 65,536 code points of the Unicode space, denoted as U+0000..U+FFFF."
This is suitable as a last resort font, which should display any character for which no match was found in the other available fonts.
This is normally preferable to a last resort font that just displays the number of a character not available in your preferred fonts.
Just showing a single screenshot of it in its intended use would go a long way.
I clicked on one of the charts and had no idea if the font itself was bitmap, or if it had just been rendered at a tiny size without antialiasing.
Given it’s a last resort font, I think it doesn’t make too much sense for print (unless you’re printing something that could be in any possible language).
It just indicates that the x-height isn't increased the way it often is for a font designed specifically for screens, and that you can have finer details like serifs and thinner strokes. It just means it's intended for high-resolution viewing.
A GitHub readme for some software that sells a subscription (or is meant for “average” users) will have way more explanations and screenshots than something that’s more technical. HN has a “leaner” (worse for mobile) interface than old reddit, while both are way better than new reddit.
And god help you if you want to understand the chain of context on a Linux mailing list (email?) thread. “What, you’re not savvy enough to know the arcane and totally unintuitive stuff we use to format and can’t make sense of it? Too bad, sounds like user error.”
Yeah this turned into a rant, but seriously, little polish goes a long way in usability.
Unifont seems to have about the same glyph coverage as my system default CJK font (unfortunately I don't know what it is).
Another example would be emoji, which would probably now be considered "basic" by most people but have always been in a supplemental plane.
https://github.com/runarberg/shodoku/issues/1
A classic utf-16 bug, where I failed to grab the two remaining bytes of these ideographs.
Tons of these open source projects have the same issue.
I mean that's pretty close no?
- what's the 2 meaning in BMP
- it's designed as a monospaced (or proportional?) bitmap font
- designed in a single 16x16 size only (or also 8x16? it's a bit unclear)
- provided as an OTF/TTF font format, which can be scaled by most font rendering engines to other sizes, but u need antialiasing to make it look smooth (this is mentioned, but under the download section only)
- use as a "last resort" default font, according to wikipedia at least