Ubuntu – way to query fonts that support a particular Unicode range

Basically what you want to do is use the range operator to limit the characters that your new grub font contains. If you don't use the range operator then you're going to get all the glyphs including the erroneous or incorrect box elements from your target font.

For example:

grub-mkfont -s 16 --range=0x0-0x7f -o /boot/grub/grubfont.pf2 font.tty

Will generate a font with only ASCII characters, anything your font doesn't have should decay gracefully to the default font so boxes and arrows should come from the default. Please see this website for further information:

http://grub.enbug.org/gfxterm

In Fontmatrix you can compare font characteristics - In the Font Information - Compare.

PS. I think that feature of Character Viewer on Mac OS X would be an awesome feature request to ask of the fontmatrix developer team.

In fact, the interface of Fontmatrix has something even better: you can select the Preview tab and enter a string (containing characters you would like the font to have), and see how it is displayed by each font. So you can scroll through the list of fonts and simultaneously see the fonts' coverage of all the interesting characters, instead of just one character at a time. This helps you visually pick out the fonts containing the selected character(s).

In the screenshot below, you can see that "BABEL Unicode Bold" (selected) contains all characters except ṝ and that "Arial Regular" (where the mouse is) contains only a few characters.