UnifontEX final build now released after 6 years

https://stgiga.github.io/UnifontEX/

by stgiga • 3 years ago

3 4 3 years ago

stgiga.github.io

stgiga3• 3 years ago

In 2017 I had started an effort to improve GNU Unifont (my efforts involved merging the Plane 0 glyphs with the Plane 1 glyphs in Unifont Upper) which after 6 years was just recently finished on September 12th. UnifontEX is the name of this fork, and what it is is Unifont 15.0.06-JP (the last and most comprehensive TrueType build) merged with Unifont 11.0.01 Upper (the highest one can merge, even with 11.0.01 Plane 0 glyphs), after deleting the placeholder hex box glyphs given to unassigned characters in Plane 0. The end result is 65417 glyphs. I made the TrueType as compatible as possible, such as by checking the "Apple" (helps older Macs), "OpenType", "Dummy 'DSIG'" (these two make the font read as OpenType even though the outlines are in TrueType format), and "Windows-compatible 'kern'" (helps older Windows compatibility and gets around "Old-style 'kern'" not being usable with the "Apple" checkbox), and I left the OS/2 and GASP table version numbers intact (Unifont used the lowest ones) so that older decoders would not have a problem. Also, I took MANY steps to make the font show up as monospaced given that many IDEs and terminals force monospaced fonts. Unifont, despite being duospaced (characters which can fit in 8x16 are drawn in 8x16 so 80 columns of them can fit on a 640px-wide screen, while characters too big for 8x16 go to 16x16 at present), it in practice behaves like a monospaced font in stuff such as IDEs and terminals after having various fields set to make it load. So, you can get Plane 0 characters up to Unicode 15.0, and Plane 1 characters up to Unicode 11. (also, using Unifont-JP as the base gave 303 Plane 2 Kanji as well as 16x16 versions of the Biang and Taito CJKV characters, none of which are in non-JP Unifont.)

I also made a BDF (including beyond-Plane0 characters, and this would be useful for upgrading the Unicode support of retro Linux systems, among other things) and TTF2PNG version of it (that last one is only 1MiB but contains the entire font, so perhaps with a DEFLATE decoder chip, among other logic, you could use it as, let's say, a font ROM. Historically, the Panasonic 3DO Kanji ROM was 1MiB, so the file size is within historical size, and the glyph sizes are within NEC PC-98 limits of 8x16 and 16x16)

As for the interesting stuff here: you get support for emoji from 2018 and before (the heyday of Tumblr, so most emoji pronouns would work in this, and I'm saying this as a nonbinary person who uses Unicode pronouns as part of my set, but those aren't emoji), so that's helpful. Secondly, not all emoji is in Plane 1, so having Plane 0 too actually makes the emoji here complete. By extension, even the Unicode implementations of Wingdings+2+3+Webdings technically pull from Plane 0 in some cases. Additionally, having Letterlike Symbols AND Mathematical Alphanumeric Symbols at the same time makes certain "fancy fonts" you see online able to be properly covered. Oh, and the kaomoji support is excellent. You also get a LOT of technical symbols, both in Plane 0's multiple blocks of it, as well as the stuff in the emoji blocks that descends from the Wingdings family. Oh, and in combination with the Plane 0 gender symbols (there are actually some in Plane 0 for less-common LGBTQ+ contexts), there are quite a few characters in the Alchemical Symbols Plane 1 block which actually represent some of the symbols you see on LGBTQ+ Tumblr that may not even necessarily have been intended to pull from Unicode. Oh, and this applies to certain characters in Plane 0. Also, gender isn't the only aspect here. I've ran into plenty of characters in Unicode and UnifontEX that I or others didn't actually think were even in Unicode at all.

TL;DR: I modded GNU Unifont to make it even better over a span of 6 years.

stgiga3• 3 years ago

Something I forgot to add was that the Biang and Taito CJKV characters live in Plane 3.

frendiversity• 3 years ago

This is phenomenal, thank you for your incredible work!

stgiga3• 3 years ago

Thank you!

UnifontEX final build now released after 6 years

Related Stories