Hacker News Reader

Comment by fafner | Hacker News Reader

I wish there were a great monospace font with extensive Unicode symbol support. DejaVu seems to support a lot of math symbols. But it's far from being perfect.

My favourite fonts Inconsolata and Adobe Source Proc support barely anything beyond latin1. So I usually end up with some ugly font mix due to fallback.

(Of course if you want all of Unicode and hate yourself there is GNU Unifont. edit: Just checked and Unifont only supports all of BMP.)

View on HN

I used DejaVu for a math symbols app, and it covered every symbol required http://mathsymbols.net/

The main problem was Apple products, surprisingly. It's crazy the iPad and iPhone don't have better Unicode support!

Try out FreeMono, thousands of glyphs. Almost entire BMP. Excellent coverage as well [1]. Looks reasonable on my Emacs [2]

[1]: http://www.gnu.org/software/freefont/coverage.html

[2]: http://i.imgur.com/gTk5H00.png

Maybe Droid Sans Mono or Liberation Mono? They both have an extensive range of glyphs but I am not sure about math symbols.

Replying to myself... For anyone interested, here are two screenshots showing the Mathematical Operators blocks of Liberation Mono and Droid Sans Mono in the current Debian Sid:

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/390716/20130412-003357-d...

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/390716/20130412-003523-d...

Droid Sans Mono's 0 and O look too similar. Which makes it useless as a programming font.

Hey, I like GNU Unifont! What's wrong with it?

http://unifoundry.com/unifont.html

Terminus is nice, too, I suppose:

http://terminus-font.sourceforge.net/

http://terminus-font.sourceforge.net/shots.html

Inconsolata is popular:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inconsolata

http://www.levien.com/type/myfonts/inconsolata.html

Reply on news.ycombinator.com