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

Consolas is a modern monospace font shipped with Micosoft's products.

An example of a font that covers a wide range of Unicode characters is Arial Unicode shipped with Microsoft Office products.

Answer 2

I'm also searching for mono space, rich Unicode font. So far I use DejaVu Sans Mono, but I wanted to know whether there is better (for me) replacement.

So, as of today, I have downloaded the following TTF fonts and count their number of glyphs:

• DejaVu Sans Mono: 3289
• Everson Mono: 9671
• Fixedsys Excelsior: 5993
• FreeMono: 4177
• GNU Unifont: 57089
• Lucida Sans Unicode: 1779

But their usefulness is also matter of what symbols are exactly supported and how they look. For example the Fixedsys and Unifont have old-school appearance. Anyway, this could be useful info for somebody...

Answer 3

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

Answer 4

While the technical specifications exist that would permit to create huge fonts, potentially covering the whole unicode range, in practice: – many apps and software stacks do not support all those opentype extensions (typically locl and OTC: https://blogs.adobe.com/CCJKType/2014/09/shs-otf-or-otc.html ) – designing all the required glyphs, and their composition rules, is a huge undertaking, many man-years to do it right

So such fonts do not exist now, or trade coverage for quality

Therefore international software should not posit the existence of a pan-unicode font but be able to compose as many different fonts as needed, with different and often overlapping coverage. It makes the software developer work harder as one may not assume the same font file is used for consecutive glyphs.

This is how modern text stacks work (for example harfbuzz-ng + fontconfig…)

Answer 5

Osaka Mono (If you are crazy like me and want to program with Japanese variable names.)

Full Name: Osaka-等幅

CSS: font-family:'Osaka-Mono';

After looking at 25+ fonts, I only found 1 that fit all of my criteria for programming:

Chart Key:
==============================================
FWK : Full Width Kanji
FWR : Full Width Roman Characters
HWA : Half Width Ascii Characters
oO0 : Can differentiate o vs O vs 0 ?
il1 : Can differentiate i vs l vs 1 ?
ZOM : Does NOT mis-align when zooming?
==============================================
                FWK  FWR  HWA  oO0  il1  ZOM 
*Osaka Mono   :  Y    Y    Y    Y    Y    Y
GNU Unifont   :  Y    Y    Y    Y    Y    -
*NotoSansMCJR :  Y    Y    Y    -    Y    -
*MS Gothic    :  Y    Y    Y    -    *    Y
Kochi Gothic  :  Y    Y    Y    -    -    Y
Hanazono Micho:  Y    Y    Y    -    -    Y
MS Hei        :  Y    Y    Y    -    -    Y
**IPA Gothic  :  Y    Y    Y    Y    Y    Y

*NotoSansMCJR : Full name is "Noto Sans Mono CJK JP Regular"
*MS Gothic    : il1 difference is subtle.
*Osaka Mono   : 
                CSS: font-family:'Osaka-Mono';
                In text editor drop down, will
                likely be: "Osaka-等幅"

**IPA Gothic  : The "\" symbol displays as a
                yen sign in HTML pages and
                my text editor. Deal breaker.

Fonts I found unsuable because either:

1. Kanji were not exactly 2 ascii chars wide.
2. Full width unicode letters were not exactly 2 ascii chars wide.

==============================================

1. Andale Mono
2. Apple Gothic
3. Bitstream Cyberbit
4. Consolas
5. DejaVu Sans Mono
6. Everson Mono
7. FixedSys Excelsior
8. Free Mono
9. Han Wang Hei Heavy
10. Han Wang Min Black
11. Han Wang Zon Yi
12. Kaiso Next B
13. Kozuka Gothic Pro R
14. Lucidia Sans Unicode
15. Monospace (By George William )
16. Nanum Gothic
17. Noto Mono
18. Noto Mono Regular
19. Noto Sans CJK JP Regular
20. Osaka
21. Roboto
22. Roboto Mono
23. Un Yetgul

==============================================

Answer 6

Nearly every font nowadays covers at least Latin, Greek and Cyrillic. And enough of Latin to support most European languages.

However, there can't be a single font covering most of Unicode, as OpenType is limited to 65536 glyphs and there are more code points assigned so far. Also it's a common misconception that a single font for as many scripts as possible is a Good Thing™. It's not, actually. Remember that for the font to work other things must be in place as well: properly defined diacritics support (so combining accents actually appear above/below the base characters and not somewhere next to them), precomposed glyphs for some scripts so the rendering engine can use them properly, this includes Arabic and and Indic scripts, ...

It's a major undertaking and as such it's not surprising that pretty much the only fonts covering large portions of Unicode are last-resort fonts, intended to be used when no other font exists to display something. As a fallback mechanism, but never as a first choice. The preferred way is actually to let the rendering engine sort out script support for fonts and not try to cram it all into a single font. See also Michael Kaplan's take on this: Arial Unicode MS effectively [bites|sucks|blows] .

Still, if you're only looking for glyph support:

• Lucida Sans Unicode
• Fixedsys Excelsior
• Everson Mono
• DejaVu Sans Mono
• Roboto Mono

Those fonts are pretty large already. But as noted above, don't count on correct workings of complex scripts or typography.