How to search for list of fonts that contain unicode points: 1F557 or 23F3

Forum|Forum|3 years ago
April 9, 2023
4 replies
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Hi all, i'm using winows 11 pro o/s and was hoping you can tell me the easiest way to find all the (free open source) fonts that would contain specific unicode points. For example: U+1F557 or U+23F3.

If you could point me to any free downloadable font that contains either of the above unicode points that would be greatly appreciated.

I've looked the at the Windows Character Map but I can't figure out how it searches through all the installed fonts. It seems it just looks within the font selected.

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A

AGuyLookingForASolutionAuthor

Known Participant

This is great. Thanks for this Ahmed. I will definitely give it a go.

James Gifford—NitroPress

Legend

In answering some of your other questions, I found a number of sources that listed this info; I recall one page that listed five or six fonts, including the Noto Emoji (or whatever the symbol variant is named), along with a freeware font named Symbola.

First, mild nudge, it's usual here to keep all discussion of one topic in one thread, instead of adding a new one for every evolving question. The same folks will read the thread as it adds more issues.

My second thought is that if you haven't found a way to get this/these glyphs into a PDF export yet, it may be time to back up and use more common, accessible characters for this project. Unicode has something like 150,000 defined glyphs, but 90% of those are found in only one or two actual fonts in use. It may be asking too much to build an entire database presentation around such scarce ones.

carenflo

Participating Frequently

James, there is a whole world of scholarly typesetting out there that needs specialty characters in unicode -- and in particular, working with Medieval manuscripts and archaic languages. Shall we just dump them in the bin? I'm suddenly finding it incredibly hard to do the work I've been doing for decades and I'm not feeling very charitable towards Adobe with the new restrictions on font uses.

James Gifford—NitroPress

Legend

Well, I once set a book introduction that had six non-Roman languages quoted within its eight pages, and thus required seven fonts. It was a prelude to a massive project of that stripe that (for good and bad) ended up sidelined.

But I can't come up with a single good reason every font — even every "major" font — should contain 80k or 100k glyphs, just because someone might need to set a passage in Urdu or Javanese (or Old Frisian, for that matter). It's a resource management issue like nearly all others; if you really need that extended glyph set, use a face or set that includes them, or set up character styles to place those words using an alternate font... or, if possible, don't use those glyphs. Even in 2023, expecting every resource in every feature in every app to handle every possible combination of need is... a bit wishful. 🙂

But fortunately all those resources, features and apps are quite flexible.

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