Last Resort Font

https://github.com/unicode-org/last-resort-font/

by lelf • 6 years ago

179 47 6 years ago

moonchild• 6 years ago

Another project is gnu unifont[1], which aims to provide a bitmapped font that covers unicode completely. Supports unicode 13 (the latest version).

1. https://savannah.gnu.org/projects/unifont

happytoexplain• 6 years ago

It says it only covers the BMP, which aligns with my expectations that common font formats can't contain enough characters to define all printable characters in Unicode.

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.

_-___________-_• 6 years ago

Note the different goals of unifont and Last Resort Font. Last Resort Font is intended to provide descriptive glyphs for all codepoints, even for those that are non-characters (which would presumably be out of scope for unifont), and to distinguish between private-use and unassigned codepoints, which would all simply be missing glyphs in something like unifont.

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.

swiley3• 6 years ago

I love unifont! Not only will you pretty much never see tofu boxes with it but (IMO) their emoji graphics are better than most. I think it might violate the standard but I really hate having emojis rendered with a different color than the surrounding text. And personally I prefer the bitmap style for graphics even if text itself is better as vectors (which is the way the font is intended to be used anyway.)

It is huge though, like 13mb for a font is a lot.

samatman2• 6 years ago

To my taste Google's Noto project is the better choice for most purposes, since they're vector, and cover more than just the BMP. I also happen to think they look better.

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.

yorwba• 6 years ago

Unifont covers all of the BMP (and more), so it's impossible for any other font to cover more of it. But Noto has nicer glyphs for the parts it does cover, so it's better to use Unifont as the fallback for characters not in Noto instead of the other way around.

labster• 6 years ago

I like the name. It’s like a warning label: break open font suitcase in case of emergency.

Ayesh2• 6 years ago

This is great! It's informative enough to end users when a glyph is missing, and stands out for developer eyes when a web font subset doesn't include particular characters.

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.

danielheath• 6 years ago

Depending on the site, 500kb is not an insignificant addition. I'd love to see browsers ship it, though.

swiley3• 6 years ago

It's way smaller than 20mb for unifont.

Scaevolus• 6 years ago

It's only 103KB in WOFF2.

j4nt4b2• 6 years ago

Which treadmill browser are you referring to?

Ayesh2• 6 years ago

Technogym Run 700, the one I see at my gym. They have a multi language setup including chinese, Japanese, and Korean, and that's as far as glyphes seem to go.

inopinatus• 6 years ago

Oh, haha. I’d read that and incorrectly inferred a sardonic reference to the “evergreen” browsers and their endless upgrade treadmill.

But, nope, not a metaphor, an actual treadmill.

mwcremer2• 6 years ago

I was about to comment on how Chicago just refuses to die, but then I noticed:

The Last Resort glyphs were drawn by Apple Inc. and Michael Everson of Evertype.

swiley3• 6 years ago

What's wrong with Chicago? Personally I think it has a nice warm fuzzy feel to it, kind of like the windows 3.1/95 theme.

divbzero• 6 years ago

Reminds me if this fun post [1] [2] from a few years back.

[1] https://medium.com/@mwichary/system-shock-6b1dc6d6596f

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10437485

djur• 6 years ago

I like that the font they decided to use for the text embedded in this font is Chicago. It's a good choice, since it was designed to be legible at a low resolution. (I'm pretty sure it's Chicago and not just a Chicago-esque font because of the distinctive shape of &.)

tobr• 6 years ago

It certainly looks like it. Which raises the question — and I know font copyrights are complicated — can they really license this as SIL OFL when it contains designs from Chicago?

mwcremer2• 6 years ago

See my comment below; Apple helped create it.

Sniffnoy2• 6 years ago

A question I've had for a while: Is there some reason the entire set of Unicode reference glyphs can't be used as a last-resort font? Sure, this would render various things wrong (e.g. Arabic, although Arabic is common enough that you're likely to have a font for it installed so this wouldn't come up), but why couldn't this be done as a better-than-nothing fallback?

kabes• 6 years ago

At least for some use cases like the web: size.

Korimo• 6 years ago

Couldn't it be installed on OS level, or at least in the webbrowser?

How are noto fonts distributed? I hope no website on this planet sends you a 12 MiB font file for some fallback purposes.

loulouxiv• 6 years ago

From https://www.unicode.org/faq/font_keyboard.html: The fonts used in the PDF code charts on our website are licensed by their owners for chart usage only, and they may not be re-used without permission of the font suppliers.

speps• 6 years ago

Certificate expired on October 5th...

Sniffnoy2• 6 years ago

Thanks, that answers the question.

lifthrasiir2• 6 years ago

License is one factor, but more importantly due to the limitation of OpenType. Last-resort fonts work because a single glyph maps to lots of characters (typically with a special support [1]); otherwise you wouldn't be able to have more than 140 thousand glyphs.

[1] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/typography/opentype/spec/cm...

aiiie• 6 years ago

What’s the deal with the Git repo not including any source code? Is this a common way to use GitHub these days, as a download server for closed source projects?

lifthrasiir2• 6 years ago

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.

dotancohen• 6 years ago

Typora does this too. They use Github to host the issue tracker [1]. I think at one time the binaries could be downloaded from Github as well.

[1] https://github.com/typora/typora-issues

kzrdude• 6 years ago

Does github even allow this. I'm their terms?

hundchenkatze• 6 years ago

It seems like it should be fine based on their acceptable use policy[0]. There is a clause about excessive bandwidth use, but nothing about what constitutes "source code."

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-...

flobosg• 6 years ago

The font is mentioned in Marcin Wichary's “When fonts fall”, discussed here a few days ago.

https://www.figma.com/blog/when-fonts-fall/

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24631681

JdeBP2• 6 years ago

A few observations:

* 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. (-:

seritools• 6 years ago

I would guess/hope the GIFs are only for display in the README.md and the actual glyphs are vector-based like a regular font (so the 200x200px problem shouldn't be one)

JdeBP2• 6 years ago

We can only take them at their word, when the downloadable file hyperlink is entitled "Source Code (zip)" and it hyperlinks to a ZIP file of these GIFs, that these are supposed to be the source glyphs.

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.

lmilcin• 6 years ago

I don't get it. Why not use actual font with actual glyphs as last resort font? Wouldn't it be better to be able to render something readable rather than placeholders, as last resort?

blendergeek• 6 years ago

This also has glyphs for non-printable and unassigned codepoints with explanations.

IggleSniggle• 6 years ago

Ligatures that might not be supported by any known fonts, otherwise unprintable characters, etc etc etc.

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.

Last Resort Font

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