complete, monospaced Unicode font?
UnicodeFontsText EditorUnicode Problem Overview
I'm looking for a good programming font that lets me add comments and string literals in Unicode, usually Japanese and Chinese along with some Latin and Cyrillic languages.
So far the situation seems to be "complete, monospace, free, pick 2" and Google is failing me with this (maybe because there are no good ones?).
The best I found is Arial Unicode but it's not monospace, which is a big nuisance for me and the editors I use. Not to mention Python indentation when I'm coding Python.
(Links, edits are welcome)
Unicode Solutions
Solution 1 - Unicode
Unicode is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly hugely mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you might think it's a long way down the codepage to ü, but that's just peanuts to Unicode.
I really doubt there's any font in the world (monospaced or not) that has "complete" Unicode. The best you can do is find a few monospaced fonts that, together, cover the space you're interested in, and make sure your editor is set up to use them.
Solution 2 - Unicode
The best I've found is DejaVu Sans Mono which is a Unicode expansion of Bitstream's Vera Sans Mono.
I'm not sure there are any 'complete' fonts, so I think you'll have to deal with a patchwork of fonts.
Solution 3 - Unicode
GNU Unifont is a monospaced, bitmapped font with complete coverage of the Basic Multilingual Plane as defined in Unicode 5.1. It is also avaiable in True Type format.
Solution 4 - Unicode
How about http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consolas">Consolas</a>;? Should be lying around on most windows boxes by now.
If not it can be downloaded here:
It does look ugly without ClearType enabled though.
Solution 5 - Unicode
Before Consolas, I always used Andale Mono as my programmer font. There's a free download available.
Solution 6 - Unicode
I'm trying to answer this question for myself, for use in Eclipse editor.
MS ゴシック (MS Gothic) is what I'm currently trying, and that seems to be pretty good for the Japanese characters I'm dealing with. Included in Windows since 2000.
Solution 7 - Unicode
One could be constructed from the Unicode Consortium's published CodeCharts.pdf by font extraction via FontForge. However:
- Legal issues would be a serious consideration.
- The extracted fonts do not align their characters to unicode code points, but rather place them at various points sometimes in order, sometimes haphazardly. Remapping them is a chore (but orders of magnitude easier than creating a font from scratch).
- Character combining, etc., logic is complex (I'd personally prefer a dumb uncombined font, with one visual position per codepoint, and display them just like on the codepages).
Solution 8 - Unicode
GNU Unifont does indeed have the complete Unicode BMP. unfortunately the UTF8 map has about 16 times as many characters, including some CJK extensions. My advice is to download Unifont and add the other characters you need by hand or by copying them from another font.
Solution 9 - Unicode
Actually I find monospaced fonts to be a nuisance when I have to read them so I use Tahoma or even Georgia for my source code. I have a very verbose coding style (an instance of type AstractModemConnector is named abstractModemConnector) so my source code looks almost like English and is perfectly readable with a proportional font.