December 25, 2006
This BDF font covers all code points in the Basic Multilingual Plane (BMP) of Unicode 5.0 (60,564 total). It is intended to use within Font View of FontForge, above each editable glyph.
This font is made on purpose to show the representative glyph to each cell displayed in the font editor, so that some glyphs are assigned to the code points that has no corresponding abstract character (for example, the halves of surrogate pair) to warn designers not to add glyphs in those code points. On the other hand, every glyph is shown in only one form even if multiple form is needed to satisfy the orthography of the language (generally, the form in the code charts by Unicode Consortium is used). Control characters and combining diacritic marks are visualized conforming to the chart. A mark is shown with a dotted circle which shows the position of base character, but you should not design them in your fonts.
Some Asian scripts are under construction. See "Progress" below. These letters are replaced with 'last resort glyph'
patch < GPL/yhunifont+wiki.diff
bdftopcf fontview12.bdf > /usr/local/share/fontforge/fontview12.pcf
cd /usr/local/share/fontforge; mkfontdir
xset fp+ /usr/local/share/fontforge
fontview12.bdf is distributed under MIT License.
GPL/yhunifont+wiki.diff is extracted from GPL based wqy-yhunifont. If you apply this patch, GNU Public License propagates to the resultant font.
Glyph images 1/3 2/3 3/3 (converted by bdf2bmp).
Ken Whisler summerizes the status of character assginments in Unicode (N3016.xls, available from ISO/IEC JTC1/SC2/WG2 Web page). Currently 60,564 code points are assigned, but it includes Surrogate (2,048), Private Use Area (6,400), Noncharacters (94) and Controls (65), so 52,017 characters of "Subtotal (traditional count)" should be used to calculate coverage.
charview12.bdf includes 42,797 (82.28%) characters (9,220 remaining). Note that some characters in CJK Unified Ideograph Extension A are mechanically generated and not yet modified by human, so they will look ugly. You can supply 7,601 glyphs (mainly CJK) from yhunifont that includes all 27,484 CJK Unified Ideographs, (URO and Extension A). It decreases characters decleases to 2,597 (6.33%).
This patch consists of glyphs in yhunifont-1.2.2 and 12pt/11pt glyphs downloaded from http://wenq.org/?CJKExtA_Index , which is not in fontview12.bdf. yhunifont is distributed under the term of GPLv2. Ext-A glyphs from wiki is the extension of GPL'ed font software according to http://wenq.org/index.cgi?CJK.ExtA.Missing , so it is presumably licensed in GPL.
| Script | Range | substitute glyph | remains |
| Syriac | U+0700–074F |  | 77 |
| Telugu | U+0C00–0C7F |  | 80 |
| Kannada | U+0C80–0CFF |  | 82 |
| Malayalam | U+0D00–0D7F |  | 78 |
| Sinhala | U+0D80–0DFF |  | 80 |
| Myammar | U+1000–109F |  | 78 |
| Mongolian | U+1800–18AF |  | 155 |
| Yi Sillables | U+A000–A48F |  | 912 |
| Arabic Presentation Forms-A | U+FB50–FDFF |  | 468 |
| subtotal (non-CJK) | 2012 | ||
| CJK URO (including extension) | U+4E00–9FBF |  | 2615 |
| CJK Unified Ideographs Extension A | U+3400–4DBF |  | 4593 |
| Subtotal (CJK) | 7208 | ||
| Total | 9220 |
This font is the extension of Mark Leisher's ClearlyU BDF Font (now distributed as a part of X11 under MIT License). Mainly cu12.bdf is used but Braille Symbols are taken from cu12-alt.bdf.
Kanji glyphs are taken from primarily from Toshiyuki Imamura's K14-{2000,2004} (public domain), which is the extension of k14 by Hiroshi Tachibana.
Other Ideographs are taken from efont-unicode-bdf, which is the compilation of BDF fonts under MIT License or public domain. Characters defined in GB-2312 and KS C-5601 glyphs are copied from this.
Ideographs defined in JIS X0212-1990 (but not in JIS X 0213) are supplied from jisksp16 (public domain).
For Enclosed CJK Symbols and CJK Compatibility, base glyphs are taken from M+ Bitmap (mplus_j10r) and Misaki Mincho (and thoroughly modified).
This font is based upon a great number of people who created base font. I am deeply grateful to the effort of them to make those fonts.
I owe to CJK radical combination data by the effort of CHISE Project. I thank them but all misdesigns are my fault.
KANOU Hiroki <kanou@khdd.net>
