Well, the second and the third sentence describe very precisely what Unifont is:

"This page contains the latest release of GNU Unifont, with glyphs for every printable code point in the Unicode Basic Multilingual Plane (BMP). The BMP occupies the first 65,536 code points of the Unicode space, denoted as U+0000..U+FFFF."

This is suitable as a last resort font, which should display any character for which no match was found in the other available fonts.

This is normally preferable to a last resort font that just displays the number of a character not available in your preferred fonts.

No mention there of the fact that this is a bitmap font. I think that's kind of important.

Indeed. Plus basic facts like: is it serif or sans? Proportional or monospace? Designed for GUI interfaces, terminals, or print? I still don't know.

Just showing a single screenshot of it in its intended use would go a long way.

I clicked on one of the charts and had no idea if the font itself was bitmap, or if it had just been rendered at a tiny size without antialiasing.

> Designed for GUI interfaces, terminals, or print?

Given it’s a last resort font, I think it doesn’t make too much sense for print (unless you’re printing something that could be in any possible language).

Saying a font is designed for print doesn't mean it's for literal professional printing.

It just indicates that the x-height isn't increased the way it often is for a font designed specifically for screens, and that you can have finer details like serifs and thinner strokes. It just means it's intended for high-resolution viewing.

Yeah I thought maybe the "uni" in "unifont" meant it was a single font that would morph between serif and sans somehow. I guess it stands for "unicode", from an era when Unicode support was not table stakes.

While virtually all fonts support characters outside of ASCII, there are few fonts that support all of Unicode. Unifont aims to be one of them.

Unfortunately I’ve often seen such things in tech - the more “purist” or deep or nerdy something is, the worse he explanations, UX/UI, and explanations.

A GitHub readme for some software that sells a subscription (or is meant for “average” users) will have way more explanations and screenshots than something that’s more technical. HN has a “leaner” (worse for mobile) interface than old reddit, while both are way better than new reddit.

And god help you if you want to understand the chain of context on a Linux mailing list (email?) thread. “What, you’re not savvy enough to know the arcane and totally unintuitive stuff we use to format and can’t make sense of it? Too bad, sounds like user error.”

Yeah this turned into a rant, but seriously, little polish goes a long way in usability.

I don’t think covering only BMP is enough these days

That's why it doesn't cover only the BMP.

Note that "nearly all" isn't "all". I have some side project that require rendering of very uncommon CJK characters, and Unifont does not display them as expected. (For that project, I used https://kamichikoichi.github.io/jigmo/ which was the font that was most complete in terms of CJK glyphs )

Unifont seems to have about the same glyph coverage as my system default CJK font (unfortunately I don't know what it is).

Do you know if those characters are in supplemental planes? The BMP would only be glyphs from U+0000 through U+FFFF (though the first 32 and last two aren't printable, and wouldn't be included in this font).

Another example would be emoji, which would probably now be considered "basic" by most people but have always been in a supplemental plane.

Lots of the rarer CJK ideographs are outside the BMP.

This was actually the first issue for my kanji learning app

https://github.com/runarberg/shodoku/issues/1

A classic utf-16 bug, where I failed to grab the two remaining bytes of these ideographs.

I was also confused, until I clicked “Home” and realized the link was not to the landing page.

>Shouldn't the first sentence on that website describe what GNU Unifont actually is?

Tons of these open source projects have the same issue.

> GNU Unifont is part of the GNU Project. This page contains the latest release of GNU Unifont, with glyphs for every printable code point in the Unicode Basic Multilingual Plane (BMP)

I mean that's pretty close no?

Still doesn't exactly say what it is? I get that it's glyphs for printable characters, but honestly it could be a PDF, video, collection of PNGs or SVG files, an Adobe Illustrator file, a linux distribution, a web browser, or pretty much any other piece of software or data format. I presume it's a TTF or OTF font file?

It's a bitmap font: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_font#BITMAP

no. as others have stated too, the following should be mentioned

- what's the 2 meaning in BMP

- it's designed as a monospaced (or proportional?) bitmap font

- designed in a single 16x16 size only (or also 8x16? it's a bit unclear)

- provided as an OTF/TTF font format, which can be scaled by most font rendering engines to other sizes, but u need antialiasing to make it look smooth (this is mentioned, but under the download section only)

- use as a "last resort" default font, according to wikipedia at least