Good Font for Unicode Symbols

fontsunicode

I'm looking for a good font for displaying Unicode, specifically I'm after a complete set of U2400-U2800. In Firefox I get most of it, but in my application I've tried Arial Unicode MS, Lucida Unicode MS, Calibri, Times New Roman, Courier New, Symbol, and Serif, most on recommendation from pages I found through Googling, some from Firefox defaults, but I'm consistently missing U2680-U26A0 and a couple other smaller blocks.

The reference charts at unicode.org of course display the complete range, but they don't identify the fonts used (presumably to avoid the threat of piracy, though that seems quite self-defeating to me). Extraction of the fonts (to get names only) via fontforge or various web services fails as the fonts appear to be contained within encrypted sections which are unsupported (another anti-piracy measure…*sigh*).

So, if anyone could recommend a more complete Unicode font (free or reasonably priced is best), I'd be very much obliged.

Cheers,

Ehtyar.

Best Answer

Here that range is mostly filled by Deja Vu Sans, STIXGeneral, VL Gothic, UnDotum, and... "MiscFixed", whatever that is (in the OCR section). Only holes at U+244A, U+24EB through U+24FF, U+269D, U+26BA through U+26BC, U+26C0 through U+26C3, and U+27CA remain.

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Linux – How to get Firefox to use MS TrueType fonts for Helvetica, Times, etc

Edit: I completely updated this answer after getting some breakthrough advice from a colleague.

Here's what I inserted in /etc/fonts/local.conf (inside the <fontconfig> element):

<!-- Replace Helvetica with Arial -->
<match target="pattern">
    <test qual="any" name="family">
        <string>Helvetica</string>
    </test>
    <edit name="family" mode="assign" binding="strong">
        <string>Arial</string>
    </edit>
</match>

Similarly for Times -> Times New Roman. (See my full local.conf here.) The key was to use binding="strong" for the <edit> element. (Also, using "assign_replace" mode instead of "assign" causes something similar, except that then it's too aggressive: also Verdana gets replaced with Arial).

Changes in font configurations are effective immediately. Besides testing in Firefox, you can check that it works like this:

$ fc-match helvetica
Arial.ttf: "Arial" "Normal"

If you run into problems, the best help is near: man fonts-conf. (Although even with the documentation, the workings of the font system seemed somewhat complicated or unwieldy to me.) You can also try to "debug" what's really going on using a command like:

FC_DEBUG=4 fc-match helvetica

In addition, FC_DEBUG=1024 fc-match helvetica shows the list of config files that affect the font matching.

Mac – Telugu (unicode) font rendering in emacs

gedit uses Pango, which gives it access to advanced text layout functionality for Indic languages. There is no version of emacs that supports Pango, so there is no way to fix this.

Best Answer

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Linux – How to get Firefox to use MS TrueType fonts for Helvetica, Times, etc

Mac – Telugu (unicode) font rendering in emacs

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