It doesn't do Tibetan

April 27, 2005 1:25 PM

Sick of ▯? Try Code2000.
posted by Pretty_Generic (9 comments total)

Perfect for all your Ogham typesetting needs. This is pretty cool.
posted by Wolfdog at 3:18 PM on April 27, 2005

Can someone tell me what language uses pictures of telephones, lightning bolts, and a caduceus?

Because, you know, I'm wondering why they have a specific unicode character instead of being dingbats? :-D
posted by shepd at 3:24 PM on April 27, 2005

Dingbats are bunk.
posted by Pretty_Generic at 3:32 PM on April 27, 2005

Dingbats are bunk.
That's the best sentence I'll see all day, and I don't even know why.
posted by Wolfdog at 3:43 PM on April 27, 2005

It's like a weeping syzergy of blebs.
posted by Pretty_Generic at 3:55 PM on April 27, 2005

I kind of like the ☏. ☀, ☁, ☂, and ☃ are also personal favorites. I kind wish people would use what unicode provides us more often. For example: I think my ♀ is a ☭.
posted by mexican at 11:59 PM on April 27, 2005

I just reinstalled this and remembered why I'd uninstalled it. If you use Code2000 for a continuous ancient Greek text in MS Word, there is a TON of whitespace between every character (equal to an actual space character). I've never seen this with any other font. Something's buggy. I guess they're more interested in those "exotic" Unicode characters as individual pictures (the characters are decently well-designed; no italics though). Didn't occur to them to test for the strange case that someone would wish to read books written in telephone-dingbat-hieroglyphics.

If you want a Unicode font with generous provision of languages, actually designed for texts and reading, have a look at Gentium.
posted by Zurishaddai at 6:34 AM on April 28, 2005

I was being a bit parochial with Gentium (turns out it's really only good for Greek and Latin, tho it's got tons of diacritics, IPA, etc.). But here's a decent set of fonts (FreeSerif, FreeSans, FreeMono) that supports Cyrillic (all or most of range plus Komi letters), Ethiopic, Greek (including polytonic), Hebrew, Latin, Japanese (Hiragana and Katakana only), Thaana.
posted by Zurishaddai at 3:52 PM on April 29, 2005

Also Titus Cyberbit (Arabic script (Arabic, Balochi, Kashmiri, Kirghiz, Ottoman Turkish, Persian, Punjabi Shahmukhi, Uighur, Urdu, Uzbek), Armenian, Cyrillic (all or most of range plus Komi letters), Ethiopic, Georgian (Mkhedruli & Asomtavruli), Greek (including polytonic and Coptic characters), Hebrew, IPA, Japanese (Hiragana and Katakana only), Latin, Ogham, Runic, Thaana, Vietnamese)
posted by Zurishaddai at 3:56 PM on April 29, 2005