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From: Nobody <nobody@nowhere.com>
Subject: Re: unicode by default
Date: Sat, 14 May 2011 09:34:54 +0100
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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.