Complete list of charecters in order?

[Ryan Maelhorn]

This topic was imported from the Typophile platform

On the new Turkish Lira thread, I heard you guys debating weather or not it already existed as "charecter 2024" or something like that. What is this list, and where can I get a hold of it? It doesn't seem to be the standard ascii chart. I would assume this is the list or chart or whatever that loads into fontlab when you start a new font? That doesnt seem to match the ascii chart either.

Here is a super basic list, helpful for anyone trying to create a font with only the core english charecters:

!"#$%&'()*+
,-./0123456
7890:;<=>?@
ABCDEFGHI
JKLMNOPQ
RSTUVWXYZ
[\]^_`abcdefg
hijklmnopqr
stuvwxyz{|}

[kentlew]

> What is this list, and where can I get a hold of it?

Unicode: http://www.unicode.org/charts/

[Ryan Maelhorn]

Thanks, kentlew. That is a huge selection!
Is there anykind of super unicode chart that contains all the others combined? I know Opentype can store 65,000 characters...

[Ryan Maelhorn]

OK, this looks fairly close:

http://www.ssec.wisc.edu/~tomw/java/unicode.html

[Michel Boyer]

If you only want a list: http://unicode.org/Public/UNIDATA/NamesList.txt

[Theunis de Jong]

Ryan, your "fairly close" list only goes up to Unicode U+FFFF. There are, quite literally, thousands of additional character assignments with yet even higher codes. Do not confuse the number of glyphs (not "characters") that can be stored into an Opentype file with the Unicode assigned to each glyph. They are separate things.
For all things Unicode, Unicode.org is the website to explore. Every other list is derivative.

Unicode, by the way, is the answer to your initial puzzling query "it's not in the ascii chart". "The" ASCII chart (a name so ill-defined that you are better off not using it) can only hold 256 characters. To circumvent that built-in limitation, as well as to finally set a world-wide standard to what character gets assigned what code, Unicode was devised. Current font design software may appear to "support" various ASCII-based constructions such as Code Pages, but in reality everything is done through Unicode.

[Ryan Maelhorn]

Now Im curious if there has ever been a font that had all those characters. Even one without the asian glyphs and herioglyphs. And if there is nothing like that, what font DOES have the largest number of glyphs?

[Riccardo Sartori]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode_typefaces#Comparison_of_fonts

[hrant]

https://typography.guru/forums/topic/99519-forwarding

> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode_typefaces#Comparison_of_fonts

Why isn't Segoe anywhere in there?
BTW, [my] Tahoma doesn't have Armenian.

hhp

[Theunis de Jong]

It's kind of hard to put a real number to that. The largest fonts, by far, are always going to be the Asian ones. I can't think of a "regular" font that literally has thousands of glyphs. Maybe Zapfino Pro just goes across that number, as it has lots of alternates and ligatures.

Arial Unicode MS and Lucida Sans Unicode are efforts to have a large, design-wise coherent set of glyphs. You might already have one of these, or both, in your system fonts. ("Design-wise coherent" was the intention, but there has been comments on Arial Unicode's. Search this forum, I'm sure it has been mentioned a few times.)

Code2000, by James Kass, is a serious attempt to contain all Unicode characters in the Basic Plane. Its official website has been taken over by someone else, so you have to Google for a download site -- it's freeware.
Code2000 is a huge font (8.4MB), but aiming for completeness rather than proper design. Lots of glyphs are "shared" between the same code points, some of which are perfectly acceptable ("Latin "A" and Greek "Alpha") and others where there seems to be some dispute. Code2000 contains 63,545 glyphs; but not every glyph is bound to a single character; the last 10,000-or-so glyphs are just there to make compound characters from, and should not be used on their own.

Since Unicode is layered (some might say, like an onion) -- additional Planes are put in separate fonts Code2001 and Code2002. A very worthy effort, except that Unicode is constantly expanding, and they are always adding more and more glyphs to the defined sets.

Then there are the so-called "Fallback" fonts -- an interesting category of their own. They do not define a single glyph for each separate code, but assign one per Unicode block. That way you always see something -- even if it's only a reminder you are "missing thus-and-thus". The canonical fallback font is "Last Resort", included in Mac OS X.

And then there is Ken Lunde's "UnicodeAll", which not as much concentrates on having correct glyphs (I think it only contains one ;-) ) but solely on stuffing as much as possible in the available table definitions in an Opentype font. Still -- font software ought to think it contains as much as 1,112,030 separate characters!

So I guess that makes Ken the winner!

[Andreas Stötzner]

Yeah, big or proper, this is the question.
Size matters, sure. But it’s not everything. In most cases, a font is big OR is well done.
Exceptions seem to be very rare, rather best kept secrets. For the least, the Wiki entry doesn’t tell us much about this.

Those who can boast with the highest number of characters are likely to be blamed for the most terrible glyphs.
Who is really caring for either goals?

[Theunis de Jong]

Andreas, that's how I feel about kerning. If a font boasts "10,000 kerning pairs" I find myself thinking "perhaps the designer should re-do it".

[brianskywalker]

.

[Theunis de Jong]

I know, I said that

I can't think of a "regular" font that literally has thousands of glyphs. Maybe Zapfino Pro just goes across that number, as it has lots of alternates and ligatures.

but John Hudson's Gabriola reportedly has " 4500+ glyphs [..] another league as you may have noticed." Cor! Since it's not an Asian font, every single character must have at least a dozen alternatives!

[charles_e]

Just a note: Code 2000 is useful, but I'm hard pressed to think of anything uglier. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, I suppose.

As far as needed characters go, once they added U+1F4A9 in Plane1, I think they were done. Bring on the cat.

[hrant]

The Armenian for one is unusable.

hhp

[charles_e]

To me, the whole font looks pretty sorry -- a Big Mac font. YMMV

[Ryan Maelhorn]

Quivira looks interesting, despite having an absolutley hideous looking website.
http://www.quivira-font.com/

I actually like DejaVu Sans Bold quite a lot
http://sourceforge.net/projects/dejavu/

[dezcom]

My font with the most glyphs has just over 1,200 glyphs. It includes Cyrillic and Greek as well as almost all Latin glyphs. A typical font for me is between 500 and 800 glyphs for Latin only support. My decisions on glyphs is based on languages rather than some numbers game. It boiled down to how many languages can I support without killing myself with labor. Some languages may only need a few more glyphs so I support them. Some require a great deal more time. Vietnamese needs many additional glyphs and stacking sets of diacritics which affects vertical metrics some so I have decided not to attempt Vietnamese at this late stage of my life.

[Andreas Stötzner]

.4500+ glyphs

:-)

[John Hudson]

5128

[Andreas Stötzner]

John, congratulations to Brill!

5500

[Riccardo Sartori]

Those who can boast with the highest number of characters are likely to be blamed for the most terrible glyphs.

.4500+ glyphs

5128

5500

;-)

[hrant]

Andreas, so you just added 1000 glyphs in the three hours? ;-)

hhp

[Ryan Maelhorn]

Does anyone have opinions of Quiria or Dejavu Sans?