UnifontEX / Blog: Recent posts

This project will be mature no earlier than September 12th, when Unicode 15.1 drops, and when Unifont 15.1.x drops, dropping support for TrueType, and thus ending my work, something I have spent 6 years on. I'm finally happy to be liberated from this project. Now, I figure I should describe what this project actually IS. It's a mod of GNU Unifont's TrueType builds to be more compatible, both in character coverage and also across OS choices. I merged the last TrueType version (so far, 15.0.06, but whether or not that we get 15.0.07 or not in the next two weeks is unknown, and may not even happen given how close things are to 15.1) of Unifont with the last version of Unifont Upper (Plane 1) that can be merged after deleting the placeholder hex boxes (11.0.01 Upper), resulting in a font with 65417 glyphs, with Plane 1 compatibility from 2018 and before (so, emoji from 2018 and before are present, among other things), but as for Plane 0, you end up having anything from Unicode 15 and before. Unicode 15.1 only adds some CJK-related control characters as well as some Plane 2 ideographs in CJK Extension I that are out of scope. So, Plane 0 Unicode from before September 2024 will coexist with 2018 Plane 1 Unicode. This is still a major chunk of Unicode, and it's all in one TrueType rather than the split model of upstream Unifont. Every year I had always waited for Unicode and Unifont releases, and after 6 years of this, in 12 days, I can finally retire from this. Now, having Plane0+Plane1 in one TTF has significant upsides. Firstly, emoji aren't ALL Plane 1. Some reside in Plane 0. So those work. Also, the fancy text people put in social media fields that use Mathematical Alphanumeric Symbols actually requires certain characters from the Plane0 Letterlike Symbols block to work. Fraktur is one such fancy font affected. The ANSI escape codes standard has a code for Fraktur. UnifontEX can thus do the Fraktur escape code, as well as that code in conjunction with the Bold code. Also, the Italic code does this too, as do the cursive and double-struck sections that don't have ANSI codes. Now they work.... read more