THIS IS SO COOL WTF I LOVE IT

[ckoshka]

not an issue i just wanted to say it

[stgiga]

Why thank you! This project was a labor of love, and I remember at one stage of it sacrificing academics for it (it almost screwed me over, but that's a very long story from years ago.) I still have the files for it, but the result being something one could build with the Unifont hex files was not really the case. I rethought much of what I was doing. Ultimately, on a better computer than in those days, FontForge will crash if you open more than one font file, and while it was bad back then, the problem got worse and became unfixable (or very close to). So no 32x16 Old Church Slavonic Chinese characters, no non-game "Alien Monster", etc. Oh and that prototype used older versions for their serif characters. Those were VERY annoying to integrate, and were one of the biggest thorns in my side. UnifontEX meanwhile only took an hour to update, that hour being spent largely removing the hex box placeholder glyphs. Plus the result can be built automatically and with far less input files (only 2 versions of Unifont, rather than, like, 10). Plus, who am I (a monolingual white [Armenian though] Westerner) to decide how non-ASCII text looks? In the words of Tom Scott, It is something that I am not qualified to talk about!. Nonetheless, I am glad you enjoy what I spent basically all of my HS and Community College years on. I originally started seriously heavily working on it when I needed to input VERY special physics characters in my Physics Honors course in my second year of HS. I have dysgraphia and am terrible at handwriting English, let alone ANYTHING else. I don't even have a full 96 ASCII characters I am able to handwrite. So in essence, I made my own form of accessibility tool because, Microsoft Word's math features didn't have the needed characters for Physics. Funnily enough, I'm FAR better at writing than math. I'm planning on using UnifontEX in my technical writing exclusively. No other font will be used. I also use it in my IDEs, text editors, and Terminals because it behaves like a monospace font and can display all sorts of fancy characters, including the esoteric Fraktur and Fraktur+Bold ANSI sequences. And of course emoji. Also, I tested it on a 2013 MacBook Air still running its original OS, and it was able to display virtually all the fancy Unicode on places like Archive Of Our Own, Tumblr, and Twitter/X/𝕏. That's its own story though. I also have Firefox/forks set to force ALL page fonts to it because compatibility. I even used about:config to make it forego the Mozilla Twemoji, Apple Color Emoji, or Segoe UI Emoji UNLESS the character DOESN'T exist in UnifontEX. Sadly, YouTube, Discord, Mastodon, and Twitter/X don't get the memo to not use their own Emoji fonts unless a character doesn't exist. Oh, also, Blink-engine browsers don't have nearly as much control over font rendering as Firefox/forks do. You can't for instance force something like Opera GX to force ALL fonts to this. I wish UnifontEX were integrated into stuff like Archive Of Our Own, Fanfiction.net, FurAffinity, SoFurry, Furry Network, DeviantArt, and basically any site that has literature sections. The WOFF1 version of UnifontEX is small at 3.7 megabytes (an average photograph and/or ad), so granting good Unicode support to a site wouldn't hurt anything. People could actually use Unicode in their stories and people would actually be able to see it without screwing around with their Firefox settings. Oh better yet, Android being the FOSS OS it is should allow using it as a font choice for if something isn't supported. I can read it just fine, and I have what one would consider dyslexia (it manifests in multiple ways, be it issues with tables/grids/graphs, eyes jumping up when reading books, or sometimes mis-seeing words. I exhibit the symptoms of it, but I haven't been tested for it. I don't know the science behind why I can read UnifontEX over OpenDyslexic.) I have my MoonReader+ environment full of Fanfiction set to make books render in it (PDFs don't), and I'm able to read it just as well as the official Fanfiction.net app, which I had to toy around with the behavior of MoonReader+ scrolling to emulate its scrolling. I tried various F-Droid e-book readers, but they didn't allow font stuff, so... Also I put UnifontEX on my Kindle (long story), and it works. I have a LOT of plans for UnifontEX, but they are somewhat down the road. If there's anything you should know about me, I'm cunning and ambitious. And tenacious. If I'm going to do something, I feel like I should go for it and do it to the best of my ability. That's the philosophy behind quite a few of my projects. BWTC32Key's compression level box took extra effort to implement, but I did so just in case someone actually needs it. My various SoundFonts could have just stopped at General MIDI, but in multiple cases I decided to just see how far I can make them go into compatibility with extensions to General MIDI. It's an ongoing effort as of the time of writing. I do all of this stuff as a hobby, and it has nothing to do with my career pathway. I get bored easily, so I do stuff like THIS. I'm always so satisfied when I'm done, and then it's something else, or I go back in later and make edits. I do all this because I can. I do things so that others don't have to. Oh and yes, I'm writing this while drained from Thanksgiving and admittedly somewhat off, so... Pleease forgive my rambling about stuff. I'm reopening this issue if anyone else wants to thank me for this!

[stgiga]

UnifontEX now supports Unicode 15.1

[teohhanhui]

Thanks! It works nicely as a fallback font.

[stgiga]

Thanks! It works nicely as a fallback font.

See, the thing about upstream Unifont is that it doesn't have Plane 0 and Plane 1 in the same file, which does actually cause some limits.

There are reasons I feel like it should be used in cases where there is user-created content involved. It even beats out Noto in some aspects, like not being a giant soup of TTFs.

A LOT of the sample text highlights stuff that cannot be done without Plane coexistence.

Mathematically, it's possible to go up to Unicode 18 (or 19 if Unicode 19 adds very few Plane 0 characters) based on what Unicode characters are expected to come after September's Unicode 17 release. See, Unicode 17 adds well over 50 new characters. Most are combining or Arabic characters. You get around 65502 characters after doing the Unicode 16 additions plus the Unicode 17 ones when they happen. The stuff after Unicode 17 (so Unicode 18) puts UnifontEX just under 10 slots away from filling 65535 glyphs. Keep in mind that there is a LOT of rigmarole to update releases, namely that I have to make sure something turns out to be the correct file size in several cases. I do have to wait until September to do the Unicode 16 additions so I don't get blindsided by a surprise update and have to redo it in response. All of going beyond what is here now involves FontForge fixing certain bugs.

[teohhanhui]

which does actually cause some limits

Do you have any specific examples, compared to using "Unifont", "Unifont Upper"? I understand that "UnifontExMono" would of course be a better option in scenarios where we're limited to only one font.

giant soup of TTFs

TTC solves that, right?

[stgiga]

which does actually cause some limits

Do you have any specific examples, compared to using "Unifont", "Unifont Upper"? I understand that "UnifontExMono" would of course be a better option in scenarios where we're limited to only one font.

giant soup of TTFs

TTC solves that, right?

Basically, in a LOT of environments, you can't set multiple fonts, so Unifont+Upper can't be chained.

Also a LOT of characters span both planes. So rapid-switching just isn't possible.

TTCs don't fix it. Only HarfBuzz beyond-64k extensions and CFF2 can.