Re:Last Resort Font
by Sniffnoy on Friday October 09, 2020 @01:35AM
(#24727153)
A question I've had for a while: Is there some reason the entire set of Unicode reference glyphs can't be used as a last-resort font? Sure, this would render various things wrong (e.g. Arabic, although Arabic is common enough that you're likely to have a font for it installed so this wouldn't come up), but why couldn't this be done as a better-than-nothing fallback?
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From https://www.unicode.org/faq/font_keyboard.html:
The fonts used in the PDF code charts on our website are licensed by their owners for chart usage only, and they may not be re-used without permission of the font suppliers.
Certificate expired on October 5th...
Thanks, that answers the question.
Re:Last Resort Font
by lifthrasiir on Friday October 09, 2020 @03:34AM
(#24727702)
License is one factor, but more importantly due to the limitation of OpenType. Last-resort fonts work because a single glyph maps to lots of characters (typically with a special support [1]); otherwise you wouldn't be able to have more than 140 thousand glyphs.
[1] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/typography/opentype/spec/cm...
At least for some use cases like the web: size.
Couldn't it be installed on OS level, or at least in the webbrowser?
How are noto fonts distributed? I hope no website on this planet sends you a 12 MiB font file for some fallback purposes.
Re:Last Resort Font
by NightMKoder on Friday October 09, 2020 @03:19AM
(#24727636)
I think the issue comes with new Unicode releases with older oses not getting updates. In the browser world I’m not sure how bad it is since browsers get auto updates frequently, but e.g. iPhone 5 users are never going to see the newest emojis.
>How are noto fonts distributed?
On PC? Package managers, search for "noto-fonts" here[1], I installed them a year ago. If you want the full set it'll be a 200+ MiB download.