Hi! As a part of Debian fonts team work, we're trying to improve fonts review: ways to organize them, add metadata, pick which fonts are installed by default and/or recommended to users, etc.
I'm looking for a way to determine a font's coverage of available scripts. It's probably reasonable to do this per Unicode block. Also, it's a safe assumption that a font which doesn't know a codepoint can do no complex shaping of such a glyph, thus looking at just codepoints should be adequate for our purposes. A naïve way would be to count codepoints present in the font vs the number of all codepoints in the block. Alas, there's way too much chaff for such an approach to be reasonable: þ or ą count the same as LATIN TURNED CAPITAL LETTER SAMPI WITH HORNS AND TAIL WITH SMALL LETTER X WITH CARON. Another idea would be giving every codepoint a weight equal to the number of languages which currently use such a letter. Too bad, that wouldn't work for symbols, or for dead scripts: a good runic font will have a complete coverage of elder futhark, anglo-saxon, younger and medieval, while only a completionist would care about franks casket or Tolkien's inventions. I don't think I'm the first to have this question. Any suggestions? ᛗᛖᛟᚹ! -- ⢀⣴⠾⠻⢶⣦⠀ ⣾⠁⢠⠒⠀⣿⡁ A dumb species has no way to open a tuna can. ⢿⡄⠘⠷⠚⠋⠀ A smart species invents a can opener. ⠈⠳⣄⠀⠀⠀⠀ A master species delegates.