unicode - How to browse a font by characters from a given codepage?

07
2014-07
  • colemik

    Most of the font manager tools display characters of a font grouped by subsets of the Unicode character set. Is there a tool that displays the characters grouped by the particular code page that a given font supports? I.e. for the font Arial, display all characters that are part of the Windows 1252 code page.

    //edit:

    The only program that does exactly this is Windows Character Map:

    enter image description here

    The problem with Character Map is that:

    • I'm not sure how do entries in the menu map to actual code pages. For the Windows* ones, one could use this table (i.e. Windows: Central Europe maps to Windows-1250), but what about the DOS ones
    • certain code pages are missing in the menu
    • inside of the properties of the font file, there is a list of code pages that a given font supports. Seeing those code pages would be helpful, if possible
    • there is no way that I've found to see the character code from the code page selected, only the UTF-16 character code is shown (U+XXXX), though for this one could use the conversion table.
    • Answers
  • colemik

    Thanks to Jukka, what I ended up doing was to swap the font on the webpage that displayed the code page to Unicode mapping. Hopefully it doesn't matter if glyphs of the font are accessed through the Unicode code (UTF-8 on the webpage) or through the code page code. Here is the Stylish script to do just that:

    @-moz-document regexp("http://www\.fileformat\.info/info/charset/.*/grid.htm.*") {

    body {
        font-family: 'Magneto', 'Unicode BMP Fallback SIL'  !important;
    }
}

    • Related Question

    osx - Where can I find a useful multi-language Unicode font for Mac OS X?
  • Stephen Jennings

    On every browser I've tried (Firefox, Safari, Chrome, and Omniweb), when I go to a web page containing somewhat less-common characters, I can't see the glyphs. For example, on the Wikipedia page for the Bengali Language, the very first line contains a string of squares; on Windows, I can see the Bengali writing. Firefox does display code points on the Coptic Language article, but not Bengali. I'm not sure why.

    enter image description here

    On Windows, as long as I have the Arial Unicode MS font installed, these characters fall back to that font and display properly. Mac OS X doesn't seem to ship with a font containing these Unicode characters (it has Arial Unicode MS, but it must be a subset of the Windows version because Bengali doesn't display in that font).

    I checked on my Snow Leopard DVD and I installed "Additional Fonts" from the Optional Installs package, but I'm still missing many languages.

    Is there any good, preferably free font that contains a large collection of languages? I know creating fonts is difficult and time-consuming, but it seems like including at least one font like this with operating systems should be standard by now.


    • Related Answers
  • Arjan

    When looking for a specific character or block at FileFormat.info, one can see which fonts are known to support it. This took me to the Code2000 font. It's $5 shareware, which seems very reasonable:

    Code2000 is a “work-in-process”, which means it just keeps getting better!
    [..]
    The registration fee for Code2000 is a “one-time” fee and registered users are considered to be registered for all newer versions.

    I've not used it, but is seems to support a lot of blocks, and certainly looks nice. Still, as for Bengali no browser shows a fallback glyph (but shows squares instead), installing it might not even solve the issue for all blocks...

  • Debilski

    There is the Gnu Unifont which allegedly covers all of the BMP, but which is a pixel font, so you shouldn’t want to use it for printing or headlines.

    This might be of some help for you: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode_fonts but unfortunately, it does not cover which characters are included.

    This does: http://www.alanwood.net/unicode/fonts_macosx.html although it does not show Arial Unicode on the Mac list (though it does on the Windows list).