Unison

Unison is a pan-Unicode hybrid bitmap monospace font in development.

• Glyph samples
• Live sample

Pan-What?

A "pan-Unicode" font covers many, if not all, scripts in the Unicode. Common pan-Unicode fonts include Arial Unicode MS, Code2000, GNU Unifont, GNU FreeFont, and most recently, Noto font family. Unison is designed to be pan-Unicode too.

Conceptually, Unison shares the same goal as GNU Unifont, a fixed-size bitmap font. The major differences (and possible advantages) are as follows:

• Unison defines a subpixel shape (hence a "hybrid" bitmap font).

  Many other pan-Unicode fonts are either bitmap-only or outline-only, and look not that good when zoomed in (bitmap-only) or zoomed out (outline-only). While outline fonts try to solve this problem by (largely manual) hinting, it is very hard and expensive.

  In contrast, a single font description in Unison can yield both a good bitmap font and a reasonable outline font. I believe this is an alternative path worth trying.

• Unison tries to support complex script behaviors.

  GNU Unifont in particular is a collection of fixed bitmaps, which is of course vastly insufficient in the actual typography. Unison aims to support many complex script behaviors in terms of OpenType.

• Unison is designed to be error-proof.

  Whenever possible, a different character (after the canonical normalization) is assigned a slightly different shape. This provides a partial solution to problems like IDN homograph attack.

• Unison is designed to be consistent and uniform.

  GNU Unifont is known for the varying degree of character designs due to a sheer number of contributors and lax design goals. Unison tries to be more consistent and uniform in the design.

• Unison is in the public domain.

  Many free and libre fonts use GNU GPL (with a font embedding exception) or SIL OFL. This is partly because outline fonts are programs and thus treated as softwares. They also clearly deserve the credit and GPL+FE and OFL is a way to ensure that. But Unison, being a primarily bitmap font, has less benefits in using such licenses. In lieu of this, Unison font data is available for all purposes. Note that the softwares in src/ have a different license.

  I originally have made this font out of the necessity (a self-contained font for Angolmois), and then for learning the font design and OpenType, but I think the font itself may be useful for others. Have fun!

Coverage

For now, please see the bitmap glyph chart below.