one unicode font to rule them all?

[mean_liar]

Is there one single font with every goddamn Unicode character in it, that will display everything I ever look at?

[Username17]

Is there one single font with every goddamn Unicode character in it, that will display everything I ever look at?

No. But some get very close

The problem is that people keep adding to unicode.

-Username17

[mean_liar]

I still don't understand, then.

When I go to...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enkidu

...how do I get the cuneiform to display properly?

[Murtak]

Installing ttf-ancient-fonts and ttf-unifont let me see those. I have no clue what font they were added to, what encoding is being used or why the fuck OpenOffice thinks a pasted cuneiform is Times New Roman. I'm going to paste it here, just to see what happens.

𒂗

Edit: Holy shit, it works. Ok, for Windows users, try this. And if it works at all don't expect it to work between programs, when printing, on a full moon or twice in a row. Unicode won't be stable for decades, then tack on another century for programs to be coded with unicode in mind.

[Crissa]

Well, first off, Windows uses a font system where the location of a character in a font and the location of the character in unicode are different systems, but the variable is the same size. So character number 8999 might be Bold-italic-A, or it might be some position in unicode.

Secondly, everyone uses different input systems so that their set of characters is at the beginning. That means that past a certain point, characters get funny.

So what you need is a program that translates unicode into finding each proper (but smaller) font sets.

Of course, OSX does this without add-ons...

-Crissa

[shadzar]

Each font is mapped differently, but you may want to try installing a different language package like Japanese to windows to get a crap ton of the unicode characters.

This is where it will be fun when unicode URLs come about. Nobody can type in the web addresses!