Best Unicode Fonts for Programer

This page shows the best fonts for programers.

What do i mean “best”? The font should be:

1. Monospace.
2. Clearly distinguish {digit zero,capital letter O, small letter o } 0 O o and {digit one, lowercase letter L, capital case letter I} 1 l I
3. Have lots math symbols and commonly used Unicode character available.

There are lots fonts designed for programers, but as soon as you started to use some math symbols or Unicode symbols, they don't work well.

Copy and Paste the following into your editor, see how your font do.

For more examples of Unicode characters, see: Unicode Characters Search ☢ ☯ ☭ ∑ ∞ ♀ ♂ ♥.

Best Fixed-Width Fonts for Unicode

DejaVu Sans Mono

Download DejaVu fonts at https://dejavu-fonts.github.io/

DejaVu has significantly more Unicode symbols than other popular fixed-width fonts such as {Courier New, Sans Mono, Miriam Fixed, Lucida Console, Lucida Sans Typewriter}.

[see Math Symbols in Unicode]

GNU Unifont

GNU Unifont also contains most Unicode chars. Its home page is at: http://unifoundry.com/unifont.html

GNU Unifont is a bitmapped font. (it's converted to scalable format (TrueType) in 2008 by Paul Hardy, but still bitmapped by design). This means, if you make the font size large, you'll see jagged edges.

Note: There's also Fixedsys and Code2000 that contains extensive Unicode characters. However, their quality is very bad. They are for around year 2005.

Best Variable-width Font for Unicode

Two best proportional font for Unicode are DejaVu Sans and Arial Unicode MS. Both are sans-serif.

DejaVu Sans

DejaVu fonts suite has both fixed-width and variable-width fonts.

Font for Unicode Emoji 😸 👍

see Download Free Unicode Fonts

Which Font Has All Unicode Chars?

No single font has ALL Unicode chars. At best, they contain all chars in the Basic Multilingual Plane, meaning, the most commonly used ~65 thousand chars. (That is, 16 bits).

Font Substitution Tech

{Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, Linux} all have Font substitution technology. When a char in the current font doesn't have a glyph, the system search for the glyph in other available fonts. So, this way, each font can be specially designed for a particular language or purpose, while you can still display many Unicode symbols in the same page.

StackOverflow answers: “How does a Unicode character get mapped to a glyph in a font?”: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3582944/how-does-a-unicode-character-get-mapped-to-a-glyph-in-a-font

2012-11-29 Thanks to Pete Forman who suggested the font DejaVu. 〔Pete Forman websites https://payg-petef.rhcloud.com/home?i=1 http://petef.22web.org/ 〕

Emacs: Font Setup

Emacs: Font Setup