Monospace Unicode font

Question

Can anybody please tell me the monospace font that covers most of the unicode characters If not then a monospace font that contains most of the european language character s

Answer 1

The ONLY standard install font I have ever found that works with a good range of unicode blocks encoded is...

FONT="-misc-fixed-medium-r-*-*-15-*-75-75-c-90-iso10646-1"
BFONT="-misc-fixed-bold-r-*-*-15-*-75-75-c-90-iso10646-1"

I set Xresources to...

XtDefaultFont:  -misc-fixed-bold-r-*-*-15-*-75-75-c-90-iso10646-1
XTerm*font:     -misc-fixed-medium-r-*-*-15-*-75-75-c-90-iso10646-1
XTerm*boldFont: -misc-fixed-bold-r-*-*-15-*-75-75-c-90-iso10646-1

This Font includes Glyphs for...

Arrows U+2190
Mathematical U+2200
Technical U+2300
Miscellaneous U+2400
Graphics U+2500
Miscellaneous Symbols U+2600
Dingbats U+2700
Braile U+2800

I have tried to use the newer, GTK and Truetype unicode fonts. And while they implement a larger range of glyphs, including he latest emoji. But they mostly suffer when you simply want a fixed-width font that really is FIXED-WIDTH!

The Graphics and Mathematical Blocks for example often do not work with character extensions across multiple lines. You often only have to look at Extended Braces, to see the font and application falling flat on its face, with symbol characters not lining up properly.

Add to that the applications often leave gaps between characters or between lines, making characters 'fuzzy' from over use of scaling and anti-aliasing in the rendering, or not implementing the combining properities for the unicode block "Combining Diacritical Marks for Symbols U+20D0 - U+20FF" and you see the newer fonts are basically a sorry mess!

Basically XTerms, and X-Window "fixed" font (as above) seemed to have put in the time and thought put into making the font work properly as a whole.

Big thanks to Markus Kuhn for such a great effort!

For my notes from researching this see... http://www.ict.griffith.edu.au/anthony/info/data/utf8-demo.txt