On Thu, 2 Dec 2004, John Cowan xiele: > Paul Hastings scripsit: > > > speaking of which, *are* there any open source fonts that come even > > close to Arial Unicode MS? > > In what, breadth of coverage or aesthetics? The GNU Unifont has very > wide coverage though it is a bitmap font; James Kass's CODE 2000 and CODE > 2001 probably have the widest coverage of any font, though it costs US$5 > to use them. Both of them IMHO are a tad on the ugly side.
In all fairness, the CODE 2000 font from James Kass is quite beautiful, conceptually speaking. If the current execution is a tad ungainly here and there, I ask 3 questions: (0) "What do you want for nothing (if you have not yet paid the shareware fee)?"; (1) "What do you want for $5?"; and (2) what do you want from a $5 shareware font that aspires to perfect coverage of the *entire* BMP? Code2000 is not open source, but Kass is remarkably responsive to user input. I urge everyone to download a copy of Code2000, and provide the developer with feedback, both in terms of suggestions to improve the TrueType font, and in terms of money to fund development. http://home.att.net/~jameskass/ James is doing some great work, using some relatively low-level programming tools. In my experience (admittedly somewhat limited, since I don't care about *everything* in the BMP) his font works where other fonts, professional and amature, completely fail. If a font has the glyph you need in any form, that's far better than having a glyph of last resort, or no glyph at all. Disclaimer: I have no commercial relation to Kass, and have received no compensation for this endorsement. This review should also not be taken as expressing approval of the shape of any glyph in the Code2000 font, especially the Capital Letter J, which I think even Kass himself has called "quirky at best". Note however that the Code2000 "hexagram" block characters do look quite nice, and better yet, they work in Adobe Illustrator CS, though no one (neither Kass nor Adobe) seems to know why yet :-)
