6 years ago I set out to improve GNU Unifont, and finally after 6 years I have finished. It has MANY special Unicode symbols, including gender ones and plenty of technical ones. I use it as my IDE and terminal fonts on ALL my OSes. Oh and this time I fixed the link.
Also, “UnifontExMono.png” is both its own preview image as well as a proper build of the font for use cases where TTF and BDF are too big, like in character LCDs. I also do extensive documentation of my content so don’t hate me.
Here’s a link: UnifontEX
Logo:
It’s ALL the characters of the font laid out in their Unicode positions in 16x16 cells from U+0000 to U+10FFFF
Actually, technically speaking, that PNG is a preview image. It’s ALL the characters of the font laid out in their Unicode positions in 16x16 cells from U+0000 to U+10FFFF
Also I was asleep when ChaoticNeutralCzech replied, and I was really tired when I said I didn’t make a preview image. I actually DID, but it’s the TTF2PNG build of the font that was generated in a special way that makes it so that the image can be read sequentially from U+0000 to U+10FFFF in 16x16 cells to get the character you want, with no need for a definition file that shows where a codepoint is in the image. Also, it means that it also serves as a 1:1 preview that is properly mapped too.
As for why the image is “black”, it has to do with the fact that to store U+0000 to U+10FFFF in 16x16 cells in a way compatible with sequential reading it requires that the sheet be 4096x65536. Blink engine browsers as well as Samsung’s Gallery app have no problems viewing it (as well as some others), but there are also quite a few viewers that really hate this size. Oh, and the PNG is in 1bpp Indexed Color mode to get it small enough to fit in the 1MiB figure used by the 3DO console’s font chip size (Apparently the 3DO had the largest font chip.) Basically, the TTF2PNG build is its own preview image, but it may be difficult to display on some viewers. Sorry for any confusion.
Please don’t hate me.
Your explanation is OK, I just don’t know why you’ve mentioned the 3DO. Most viewers are OK with giant images as long as the file size is not too big; my guess for the image being black would be that the background is transparent and some viewers render it on a black background but I think it’s actually white. And of course the image is 1bpp because the font is in a 16x16 monochrome raster.
As for why I brought up the 3DO: It’s because the TTF2PNG version is just the right size (1MiB, thanks to the 3DO’s precedent) to be a retro Unicode font ROM in various old computers and devices. I’ve even thought about making a version of FreeDOS modeled after DOS/V (a version of MS-DOS made to display Japanese and Korean characters on VGA DOS machines) using it, and I call it “DOS/U” (Unicode DOS). I’ve also planned on using it in an open-source fantasy retro computer I make as the video chip’s internal font, and the audio chip is something else I have planned out too.
Idk, the texture cache is usually not compressed and often you can’t choose the bit depth. I don’t think 3DO games had thousands of monochrome characters, more likely a small range of nicely drawn ones – stylized, antialiased, proportional and even shaded.
Not to downplay your work of 6 years but your font might fit in a terminal (which is what Unifont was designed for) or perhaps a late 1990s phone in the Asian market (where emoji originated, after all).
When making a fantasy 3D console, you may want to consider modern graphics cards’ shader pipelines and restrict the resolution, FLOPS and memory to make writing games and/or emulators possible in standard libs like OpenGL. Also, a physical incarnation of the console will not need complicated FPGAs to run efficiently, just a cheap or old PC GPU.
