Star font glyphs
Similarly, modern fonts contain all the information for typesetting.
#STAR FONT GLYPHS SOFTWARE#
Modern fonts are the typographic equivalent of a game ROM: sure, it's not much use without the hardware or software to run that ROM on, but all the things that actually matter are in the ROM. You may think fonts are just files with pictures for letters, and someone types a letter, that picture shows up: that is not how fonts work, and isn't how fonts have worked since the late 1980's. Why not use multiple fonts and support all unicode that way? Well now, you've just described Adobe's Sans Pro, and Google's Noto (which are the same font).Īs for the "how hard can it be": a uniform style for all glyphs in Unicode, across 129 established written scripts on this planet, each with their own typesetting rules? Incredibly hard. "So what about font collections?" I hear you ask.
#STAR FONT GLYPHS CODE#
In fact, Unicode hasn't been able to fit in a modern OpenType font since 2001, with the release of Unicode 3.1, which upped the number of code points from 49,259 to 94,205. The current version of Unicode, v8 as of this answer, contains 120,737 assigned code points, or almost twice as many as fit in a modern font ( 2021 edit: v13 upped this number to 143,859).
(And note the terminology: a "glyph" is not the same as a "character" or "letter")
"Why would you even want that?" questions aside, from a programming perspective there's a very simple reason: the OpenType spec only affords an addressable glyph index space of one USHORT, so one font can only support 16 bits worth of glyphs identifiers, or 65,536 glyphs max. Such a font would be a great help to humanity and I can't see a good technical reason why it doesn't exist or at least an open-source effort to create it, so I presume an invisible-to-me reason why it can't be done.
If you got rights to some pre-existing fonts you could just composite them and that should help a lot. Is there a maximum size? Is it a copyright problem? Is essentially redrawing all ~110,000 extant glyphs too hard? I understand style concerns, but why not fall back to a 'default' font that had glyphs for everything? They're on, redrawing them all would be pretty hard work but then you'd have a guaranteed fallback font for everything. I don't know much about the underlying technical details for fonts. We have fonts that seem to be designed for maximum Unicode symbol support(Symbola, Code2001, others) and specialized fonts for certain planes or character ranges(BabelStone Han, others). Rendering all of the unicode format correctly what with composite characters and characters that affect other characters and ligatures is really hard, I understand that.