[nycticorax]

Shouldn't the first sentence on that website describe what GNU Unifont actually is? I guess it's a single copyleft font designed to have coverage of all (or nearly all?) unicode code points?

[adrian_b]

Well, the second and the third sentence describe very precisely what Unifont is:

"This page contains the latest release of GNU Unifont, with glyphs for every printable code point in the Unicode Basic Multilingual Plane (BMP). The BMP occupies the first 65,536 code points of the Unicode space, denoted as U+0000..U+FFFF."

This is suitable as a last resort font, which should display any character for which no match was found in the other available fonts.

This is normally preferable to a last resort font that just displays the number of a character not available in your preferred fonts.

[modeless]

No mention there of the fact that this is a bitmap font. I think that's kind of important.

[charlieyu1]

I don’t think covering only BMP is enough these days

[hnfong]

Note that "nearly all" isn't "all". I have some side project that require rendering of very uncommon CJK characters, and Unifont does not display them as expected. (For that project, I used https://kamichikoichi.github.io/jigmo/ which was the font that was most complete in terms of CJK glyphs )

Unifont seems to have about the same glyph coverage as my system default CJK font (unfortunately I don't know what it is).

[syncsynchalt]

Do you know if those characters are in supplemental planes? The BMP would only be glyphs from U+0000 through U+FFFF (though the first 32 and last two aren't printable, and wouldn't be included in this font).

Another example would be emoji, which would probably now be considered "basic" by most people but have always been in a supplemental plane.

[jayde2767]

I was also confused, until I clicked “Home” and realized the link was not to the landing page.

[Suppafly]

>Shouldn't the first sentence on that website describe what GNU Unifont actually is?

Tons of these open source projects have the same issue.

[leephillips]

https://lee-phillips.org/ghparty

[IvyMike]

> GNU Unifont is part of the GNU Project. This page contains the latest release of GNU Unifont, with glyphs for every printable code point in the Unicode Basic Multilingual Plane (BMP)

I mean that's pretty close no?

[smlacy]

Still doesn't exactly say what it is? I get that it's glyphs for printable characters, but honestly it could be a PDF, video, collection of PNGs or SVG files, an Adobe Illustrator file, a linux distribution, a web browser, or pretty much any other piece of software or data format. I presume it's a TTF or OTF font file?

[onetom]

no. as others have stated too, the following should be mentioned

- what's the 2 meaning in BMP

- it's designed as a monospaced (or proportional?) bitmap font

- designed in a single 16x16 size only (or also 8x16? it's a bit unclear)

- provided as an OTF/TTF font format, which can be scaled by most font rendering engines to other sizes, but u need antialiasing to make it look smooth (this is mentioned, but under the download section only)

- use as a "last resort" default font, according to wikipedia at least