

Which Unicode characters can you depend on? - ehamberg
http://www.johndcook.com/blog/2013/04/11/which-unicode-characters-can-you-depend-on/

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fafner
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.)

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

~~~
demetris
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/390716/20130412-003357-debian-
math-fonts-liberation-mono.png)

[https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/390716/20130412-003523-d...](https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/390716/20130412-003523-debian-
math-fonts-droid-sans-mono.png)

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mixmastamyk
I'm not sure the intersection is necessary. I believe that as long as a
character is included in _any_ font on the system it will get shown (in web
browsers at least).

It may not be the case on mobile, but it appears to work this way on Windows
and Linux.

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vorg
Some of those characters in Cook's blog didn't render in Chrome. Perhaps
Chrome should ship with a default font that renders _every_ Unicode character!

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ctdonath
Didn't Hofsteader have some tools for mapping characters into the essential
aesthetic form of a font? Could we at least get approximations of all Unicode
characters (from a simple base font) into all typefaces installed on a system?
(Or have I just been subjected to too much Doc McStuffins this evening?)

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eridius
Droid Sans is a font for Android. How exactly is that a "common font"? I mean,
there's a lot of Android users out there, but I would have to assume "common
font" means fonts that are available on multiple different platforms.

~~~
johndcook
Droid Sans not as common as the other fonts on the list. I threw it into the
mix for a couple reasons. For one, the feedback from twitter suggested that
Android might support fewer characters than other platforms. For another, I
expected a lot of commonality between the other fonts, but Droid fonts were an
independent effort so I thought there might not be as much overlap.

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k7lim
ಠ_ಠ

