Fonts Guide – Best Fonts for Unicode Glyphs

fontsunicode

So I was looking at this answer on stackoverflow and realized that my fonts aren't covering a whole lot of the utf-8 unicode spectrum (as I get lots of squares). Does anyone know a font that will cover all of that post?

Best Answer

The hands-down most comprehensive coverage would be Roman Czyborra's GNU Unicode Font project. It is intended to collect a complete and free 8×16/16×16 pixel Unicode font. It currently covers 34,445 characters (out of ~40,000+ defined characters).

Most distributions have GNU Unifont in their repositories.

Ed Trager has written a Unicode Font Guide For Free/Libre Open Source Operating Systems which collates geographic coverage of fonts and their associated licensing. The guide was last updated in 2008.

Other fonts with good Unicode support include:

DejaVu
GNU FreeFont, worth noting is that the Serif contains the most glyphs in this family: Serif 10537 / Sans 6272 / Mono 4178

Related Solutions

Linux – Why do some characters show as squares in Chrome

This fixed the problem for me. Install the dejavu fonts.

sudo pacman -S ttf-dejavu

URxvt Font Rendering – Fixing Too Much Space Between Characters

Urxvt has an option for basic kerning: letterSpace. See man urxvt:

-letsp number
Compile frills: Amount to adjust the computed character width by to control overall letter spacing. Negative values will tighten up the letter spacing, positive values will space letters out more. Useful to work around odd font metrics; resource letterSpace.

So you can adjust the spacing by adding a line to your ~/.Xresources, like so:

URxvt.letterSpace: -1

Note: it is difficult to tell from your first screenshot, but it looks like Urxvt is falling back to the default font as it can't find or load Terminus, hence the wide spacing. Terminus is a bitmap font (which is likely disabled by default), so you should use xfontsel to copy the correct font string into your definition.

See the Arch Wiki page on X Logical Font Description for a detailed description of how this system works.

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Related Solutions

Linux – Why do some characters show as squares in Chrome

URxvt Font Rendering – Fixing Too Much Space Between Characters

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