Unifont 10.0.01 Released

[Paul Hardy]

Unifont 10.0.01 has just been released, on the same day that Unicode 10.0.0 was formally released.

Unifont provides fonts with a glyph for each printable code point in the Unicode Basic Multilingual Plane, as well as wide coverage of the Supplemental Multilingual Plane and some ConScript Unicode Registry glyphs.

The Unifont package includes TrueType fonts for all of these ranges, and BDF and PCF fonts for the Unicode Basic Multilingual Plane.  There is also a specialized PSF font for using GNU APL in console mode on GNU/Linux systems.

The web page for this project is https://savannah.gnu.org/projects/unifont/.

You can download the latest version from GNU mirror sites, accessible at http://ftpmirror.gnu.org/unifont/unifont-10.0.01.  If the mirror site does not contain this latest version, you can download files directly from GNU at ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/unifont/unifont-10.0.01/.

This release posed a new challenge: new Chinese ideographs in the BMP to represent Orthodox Church Slavonic comprised of two fairly complex Chinese ideographs.  The high number of strokes in these additions required adopting unihex2bmp, unibmp2hex, and unifontpic to work with quadruple-width glyphs.

The unihex2bmp and unibmp2hex utilities now provide round-trip conversion between ".hex" and ".bmp" Unifont formats for quadruple-width glyphs.  The unifontpic utility compresses triple-width and quadruple-width glyphs by 50 percent.  This was not ideal, but was the most practical solution to keep the picture size a manageable size of less than one meter square.  The unihex2png and unipng2hex utilities do not support these wider glyphs at this point.

There were also many changes to glyphs from the previous version.  See the ChangeLog file in the main tarball for details.

Sincerely,

Paul Hardy

GNU Unifont Maintainer