Unicode Fonts
To display text that contains Unicode characters, you need appropriate fonts installed on your system. Without them, many characters will appear as empty boxes or "tofu." Today, most modern operating systems come with solid Unicode support built in:
- Windows: Includes wide support via Segoe UI, Arial Unicode MS (legacy), and newer system fonts.
- macOS: Provides excellent coverage through system fonts like Apple Symbols and San Francisco.
- Linux: Unicode support varies by distribution but can be enhanced by installing fonts like Noto or DejaVu.
Rather than relying on basic system fonts, it's often better to use a font specifically designed for your language/script. There are also Pan-Unicode fonts that aim to cover a wide range of characters across scripts.
Recommended Unicode Fonts
- Noto Fonts (Google): The most complete and modern Unicode font family, designed to cover every script in Unicode with visual harmony. Includes Noto Sans, Noto Serif, Noto Emoji, and more.
- DejaVu Fonts: Excellent free fonts with good coverage of Latin, Greek, Cyrillic, and some additional scripts.
- GNU FreeFont: Includes FreeSerif, FreeSans, and FreeMono, offering wide but less frequently updated coverage (~10,000 glyphs combined).
- Symbola by George Douros: Covers a wide range of symbols, emoji, and ancient scripts. Very useful for supplemental display, especially for pictograms.
Legacy Fonts
Code2000 was a popular shareware Pan-Unicode font created by James Kass, notable for its massive script coverage in the early days of Unicode. While the original website is no longer available, the font still circulates online and a new website has resurfaced (Code2001). Two follow-up fonts, Code2001 and Code2002, also exist with extended script support now.
Shapecatcher.com now primarily uses the following fonts to render characters:
- Noto Sans (not used yet, but coming soon)
- DejaVu Sans
- FreeSans / FreeSerif
- Symbola
- Fallbacks to archived renders from Code2000 where necessary
If you're interested in obtaining any of these fonts, please refer to the official pages linked above.