On Fri, 13 May 2011 14:53:50 -0500, harrismh777 wrote: > The unicode consortium is very careful to make sure that thousands > of symbols have a unique code point (that's great !) but how do these > thousands of symbols actually get displayed if there is no font > consortium? Are there collections of 'standard' fonts for unicode that I > am not aware? Is there a unix linux package that can be installed that > drops at least 'one' default standard font that will be able to render all > or 'most' (whatever I mean by that) code points in unicode?
Using the original meaning of "font" (US) or "fount" (commonwealth), you can't have a single font cover the whole of Unicode. A font isn't a random set of glyphs, but a set of glyphs in a common style, which can only practically be achieved for a specific alphabet. You can bundle multiple fonts covering multiple repertoires into a single TTF (etc) file, but there's not much point. In software, the term "font" is commonly used to refer to some ad-hoc mapping between codepoints and glyphs. This typically works by either associating each specific font with a specific repertoire (set of codepoints), or by simply trying each font in order until one is found with the correct glyph. This is a sufficiently common problem that the FontConfig library exists to simplify a large part of it. > Is this a Python issue at all? No. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
