Odp: Character count of Unicode 18 additions

[piotrunio-2...@wp.pl via Unicode]

It is important to note that Unifont/UnifontEX is not the only option for 
representing thousands of Unicode characters in 8×16 and 16×16 glyphs. The 
recently released Kissinger 2 dev5 ( typedesign.replit.app Kissinger 2 — the 
official website (replit.app) ) in 2026-02-22 has 26466 halfwidth characters, 
38948 fullwidth characters, 63060 total, and 2354 overlap. Unicode 17.0 
completeness is 48812/55653 (87.70%) for BMP, 59715/159801 (37.36%) for full 
Unicode. It also has Arabic/Hebrew/Thai/Vietnamese shaping, and 16×16 glyphs 
for Cuneiform and Egyptian Hieroglyphs, which Unifont 17.0.03 doesn't have. 
The new hex format in Kissinger 2 dev5 allows specifying character 
compositions, contextual substitutions, mark classes, and bidirectional 
properties; although that makes the hex format itself more complex, it greatly 
saves on complexity introduced by external dependencies that would otherwise be 
required. The long development process of Kissinger 2 dev5 resulted in a stable 
infrastructure for long-term usage. The OpenType build is fully verified to be 
Windows 95/98/ME Arabic shaping compatible (this requires lookups for init, 
medi, fina, liga features to be included in that order, the base ligatures and 
mark ligatures must be in separate tables, all glyphs for CP1256 characters and 
their substitutions must be within glyph index range 0x000—0xFFF, and the GSUB 
table must be ≤16384 bytes, which is not trivial given the large amount of 
contextual substitutions in Kissinger 2 dev5).   Dnia 14 lutego 2026 17:15    
stgiga via Unicode  < unicode@corp.unicode.org >  napisał(a):  To whom it 
may concern,  The way things stand right now, my Unicode font (UnifontEX) can 
incorporate ALL of the applicable Plane 0 additions going by the Unicode 18.0 
Alpha (the present one adding 13,048 total glyphs, albeit Plane 0's extras 
are all that fit), and hit a glyph count of *exactly* 65535 glyphs, without 
doing any deletions or unifications (stuff like Angstrom). I'm wondering 
how much I should trust this determination.  And there are good things that can 
happen if exactly 65535 glyphs are hit. The Unicode 17.0 version of UnifontEX 
is what I will release when Unicode 18 drops (I am behind upstream Unifont by 
one year to allow them to settle on the shapes of glyphs added in a given 
Unicode version), and it will have 65503 glyphs. If I can get to 65535 then 
that will be useful in doing text art. Without unification, if I delete the 
duplicate .null and the nonmarkingreturn glyphs that TTF insists on but does 
not require, I'd have room for two more glyphs, which if those filled would 
give me as close to true 16bit as possible, which would be absolutely fantastic 
for anyone using the font for text art/video. I know that Unicode considers 
this out of scope (as they would for BWTC32Key, which uses Unicode to 
efficiently store data), but truth be told me doing esoteric stuff with Unicode 
will, in May or June count as being half my life, as someone who turns 24 on 
May 30th, and started messing with U!  nicode fonts in June 2014.   If I had a 
stable source of income I'd join Unicode beyond just the mailing list, but 
the other issue with that is the fact that I am cagey about any places that ask 
for an offline name. I'm security-conscious as someone who has 
cybersecurity academic qualifications. In fact, the X-Face: and Face: headers 
(talk about nostalgia) in this e-mail (usually they are in the signature but 
I'm playing it safe for my first e-mail, given that mine uses ALL the extra 
modes from Japan and is thus longer than most people's and I don't want 
to trip something by accident) are not selfies but instead involve my digital 
art.   Did I mention that UnifontEX when full is planned to be used with 
HarfBuzz's beyond-64k extensions when software to take advantage of them 
comes into existence, so you're not limited to Unifont Upper 11.0.01's 
repertoire for Plane 1 and 14, and Unifont-JP 15.0.06+15.1.0x+16.0.04+17/18.x 
for Planes 0, 2, and 3 (Plane 2 and Plane 3 are Unifont-JP 15.0.06's in 
terms of coverage). So even when I am full and FontForge eventually fixes the 
DFONT bug, I'm still not done, at least once there is support for the 
HarfBuzz stuff.  That said, the HarfBuzz extensions do NOT give older apps the 
glyphs beyond maxp's size of 65535.   I suppose I'm sending this e-mail 
because I'm paranoid. Even if it means going to 2027 (and thus 13 years of 
work, also I live in the same US state as Unicode itself for the record), I 
think that going to the full maxp limit has benefits when it comes to using it 
with stuff like chafa. Not to mention the extra subscripts, punctuation, and 
other Unicode 18 additions would almost definitely help people with certain 
operations like math, and long-term this would prevail to use the extra 
characters in terms of Internet usage adoption.   Oh one thing I enjoy doing is 
finding times where Unicode accidentally encoded symbols that are used in 
contexts Unicode normally won't encode. U+2B88, U+2B89, and U+2B8B all are 
accidentally-encoded niche LGBTQ+ symbols. U+2B88 and U+2B8B are non-diagonal 
photographic negative versions of the r/AMABwGD symbol on Reddit (U+2B88 is a 
photographic negative of a certain trans group logo in California, but without 
the stroke, but keep in mind the symbol U+2B89 accidentally copied was 
according to Drayk and ReiVegan supposed to have one but was removed at the 
last minute), and U+2B89 is a photographic negative of the Andromorph Symbol 
coined by the transmasculine furries Drayk, ReiVegan, and Bullydog on 
FurAffinity. So I am not kidding, Unicode when encoding Wingdings and family in 
Unicode 7.0 just so happened to accidentally encode THREE LGBTQ+ symbols that 
by Unicode standards would be too niche to encode, and unlike the Sublimate Of 
Antimony alchemical symbol (among a few othe!  rs in the same block, Alchemical 
Symbols, and some in Miscellaneous Symbols AND Miscellaneous Symbols and Arrows 
again), these character cases don't have uses in another context other than 
they were in one of the Unicode 7.0 Wingdings addition.     ALSO: putting 
U+1D7A before U+33DF results in a string that can be read as 
"they/them" via phonetic AND spelling tricks. Oh and U+26FF is in 
addition to the flag for Japanese Self-Defence Force sites, is accidentally the 
2014 Rumpus Parable version of the Agender (genderless / no-gender) Pride Flag. 
So no, Unicode, you do NOT have "two" Pride Flags, but you in reality 
have *three*. No joke.   And yes, I HAVE tried to make ZWJs (among other 
Unicode constructs) for a decent amount of things, and yes, I've even made 
Unifont(EX/2) style pixel art.   And I do seriously plan on shoving UnifontEX 
into a dot-matrix display once it is done to allow for some seriously wild and 
useful stuff. Also I got DOSBox-X to add it for PC-98 and DOS/V support (no 
conflicts by the way). Also I DID make a Bad Apple port in which the characters 
of UnifontEX are used to draw Bad Apple. When I hit the maxout I will be 
re-making the video to take advantage of the extra slots. This will most likely 
help quite a few artifacts in the video, especially if the final glyph count is 
the highest maxp supports. I suppose you could say I'm a Unicode devotee.   
I even have considered using UnifontEX's characters in stuff like public 
kiosks of all things, what with all the stuff in Transport And Map Symbols and 
the other emoji blocks, even the characters that aren't actually emoji. If 
you want to get an idea of how many ideas I've had on ways to use this 
whole thing, UnifontEX's readme is 225KiB of Markdown, no joke, and it has 
stuff like a bunch of use cases and strategically-chosen sample text, some of 
it quite nerdy.   I suppose this e-mail is not just an inquiry but also a 
thank-you and an explanation of just how deep I am into what one would call the 
Unicode rabbit hole.  I get bored easily, and Unicode is definitely NOT a 
boring topic. Thank you for one of the wildest standards of all time. Let me 
know how true my assessment of Unicode 18 is, and if my X-Face+Face headers 
didn't come through (I can reply with them in the signature for the curious 
ones if they don't get them from this email).   Best Wishes,  stgiga   --  
"I'm here. I'm glad you're there."   I use they/them and 
neopronouns.