[HN Gopher] GNU Unifont
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GNU Unifont
Author : remywang
Score : 107 points
Date : 2025-12-12 20:57 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (unifoundry.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (unifoundry.com)
| aidenn0 wrote:
| I had to uninstall unifont to get nice looking CJK fonts in
| Firefox; somehow the font-fallback for my font was picking
| unifont over all of the other fonts installed...
| Elfener wrote:
| I've reproduced issues with Unifont's glyphs being invisible in
| firefox and chrome (at different times, on what seems like
| certain versions), with much confusion. There are a few issues
| on the nixpkgs issue tracker about this, including one about
| Noto Color Emoji doing the same thing.
|
| I love fonts...
| adrian_b wrote:
| The right way to solve your problem is to go to Firefox
| Settings/Language and Apperance/Fonts, then click on
| "Advanced".
|
| There you can set what fonts should be used by Firefox to
| display each script/language, including Chinese, Japanese and
| other CJK variants.
|
| If you do not configure this, then it is indeed unpredictable
| which fonts will be used by Firefox to render the Web pages,
| unless it can match exactly a font requested by the page.
| positron26 wrote:
| > A user has asked if GNU Unifont can be used with commercial
| (non-free) software.
|
| One can be forgiven for thinking the author means to imply that
| all commercial software is non-free. It is a further
| disappointment that anyone has to ask.
|
| Open source was right to get rid of the intentional and
| unintentionally anti-commercial motifs that only got in the way
| of paid open source development.
| pwdisswordfishy wrote:
| Ironically, it's the FSF which discourages the use of
| "commercial" to mean "non-free":
|
| https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.en.html#Commer...
| ekjhgkejhgk wrote:
| Obviosuly discourages because they're not equivalent and
| creates confusion. Stallman himself was selling copies of
| Emacs while releasing it under a Free license.
| positron26 wrote:
| Some may be confused into thinking this reply is a
| correction. I don't mean to appear to rebut.
|
| We know that the FSF is aware of the problem. The trouble can
| only be if we expect more success from repeating the same
| tactics for the next forty years. I would blame no one for
| expecting the FSF to stay the course and to achieve similar
| effects. I would also not blame them for choosing a different
| path for themselves and recommending so to others.
| F3nd0 wrote:
| > One can be forgiven for thinking the author means to imply
| that all commercial software is non-free.
|
| Do they mean to imply this? It can also be read as a
| clarification about the mentioned software, not all commercial
| software in general. Could just be poor wording.
|
| > Open source was right to get rid of the intentional and
| unintentionally anti-commercial motifs that only got in the way
| of paid open source development.
|
| Open source did succeed in avoiding the problem present in
| English language, but in doing so, shifted focus away from
| freedom and onto different confusing motifs. A rare word like
| 'libre' arguably does an even better job while staying true to
| the original ideas behind the term 'free'.
| positron26 wrote:
| I do believe it was just poor wording.
|
| I don't feel strong disagreement with the four freedoms, but
| the biggest reason I've gone fully _OSS and intentionally
| avoid "free/libre" is because I don't want to endorse the FSF
| tactics and because I want to encourage others to demand more
| radical innovations instead of forty more years of the same.
|
| What I find most disappointing when I talk to the FSF is that
| if I bring up social finance and technically enabled social
| decisions that can make social finance a lot more effective,
| it is rather as if I have spoken some alien language. I
| believe the non-programmer needs a lever to choose the
| development model used by programs they rely on. To the FSF
| insiders, such thinking is so orthogonal as to generate no
| reaction. If I say "a billion users are important," they
| refute the necessity. They are content to be monastic,
| conveniently propped up by donations for saying nice things.
| I find such abandonment inexcusable, and I get fired up
| talking about it.
| TheRealPomax wrote:
| The problem with Unifont is that is was never designed to
| actually support real text, it just has glyph support. So if you
| need "it can do every language I might want, while looking pretty
| good" you're far better off with the (much newer) family of NoTo
| fonts, which aren't just free to use, but explicitly use the
| modern SIL Open Font License.
| foxrider wrote:
| Yeah, I can't really speak well about other languages, but
| these Armenian letters look really rough.
| duskwuff wrote:
| Noto is also a scalable font with multiple weights and styles
| (e.g. bold, italic, etc). Unifont is a 16-pixel bitmap with no
| styles, so it's only really usable at one size (or maybe two if
| you want 32px text).
| phkahler wrote:
| We use GNU Unifont in Solvespace for the text window/property
| browser. It's built right into the executable. This turned out to
| be amazingly useful. Some people have CJK stuff in their designs
| and it "just works" on all platforms. I was also looking into
| hole annotations in CAD and was pleased to see the symbols for
| counter-bore and counter-sink are both already there in unifont.
|
| You can see unifont in the experimental web version here:
| https://cad.apps.dgramop.xyz/
| stn8188 wrote:
| Wow, the web version is neat in its simplicity! Thank you for
| the work on Solvespace. It's far and away my favorite MCAD
| program and always my first go-to when I need to crank out a
| quick fixture to test PCBs. It's really so pleasant and easy to
| work with as long as my geometry is relatively basic (which it
| almost always is given my limited scope of work with mechanical
| design). I'm sorry I don't have any comments on the relevant
| topic of the fonts, just was excited to see Solvespace
| mentioned.
| hackshack wrote:
| +1; thanks from another satisfied user. I have an annual
| SOLIDWORKS plan, but SolveSpace is my go-to for quick stuff.
| It makes CAD fun. There is a clarity of design behind the
| software that gives it a zen-like feel.
| graypegg wrote:
| That's such a cool effect from just the choice of font. (Though
| I guess there are countless human hours spent on unifont and
| unicode as a whole)
|
| But I love the idea that even if your bronze age CAD guy wrote
| all the solid names in Linear A, no problem!
| ekjhgkejhgk wrote:
| You know, when I see GNU, I don't necessarily think it's the best
| software in all dimensions, but it's almost the best in terms of
| respecting its users.
| magios wrote:
| i use this font system wide, forced as the only font in firefox,
| with web or downloadable fonts disabled. i also have my some of
| my own characters in csur, the conscript unicode registry, that
| is mapped to u+e000 thru u+f8ff so the unicode codepoints used by
| random webpages for various glyphs show up as my own. qt is a
| pain to use sometimes with unifont only but iirc QT_FONT_DPI=128
| environment variable fixes that. i just wish i could get unifont
| only to work in games like rimworld.
| oconnore wrote:
| Why do you do this?
| magios wrote:
| because i prefer monospaced pixel fonts, tho the underlying
| engine requires the ttf and now otf font, which is a vector
| format in order to render.
| joeel84 wrote:
| Amazing work!
| phoronixrly wrote:
| I like this better than the Google Sans Flex that made the front
| page today.
| jarbus wrote:
| Been a proud user for a while at jarbus.net :)
| nycticorax wrote:
| 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?
| IvyMike wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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?
| mariusor wrote:
| It's a bitmap font:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_font#BITMAP
| adrian_b wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| No mention there of the fact that this is a _bitmap_ font. I
| think that 's kind of important.
| hnfong wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| I was also confused, until I clicked "Home" and realized the
| link was not to the landing page.
| asgs wrote:
| it is so nice of them to explain the fact using the GNU Unifont
| in commercial non-free softwares clarifying when it is required
| to be published to public domain.
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(page generated 2025-12-12 23:00 UTC)