Beyond 65K Characters

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Erwin Denissen
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Beyond 65K Characters

Post by Erwin Denissen »

Although there is a limit to the number of glyphs that can be stored in a font (65335 to be precise), it is possible to include way more than 65335 characters in a single font.

FontCreator is one of a few professional font editors which allows you to accomplish this task.
Over91K.png
Over91K.png (91.18 KiB) Viewed 10493 times
Here is the demo font which only has 40 glyphs, but includes over 91,000 characters.
Over91K.fcp
(210.94 KiB) Downloaded 421 times
Disclaimers: This font is intended as proof of concept, and has no real use, except to show that fonts with more than 65K characters can be made.
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Re: Beyond 65K Characters

Post by Alfred »

Very impressive, Erwin, but what's the explanation for the strange totals in some of the Unicode ranges (e.g. Greek and Coptic 144/134)? :?
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Re: Beyond 65K Characters

Post by Erwin Denissen »

There are a couple of gaps in those specific character ranges, and since I included whole blocks (e.g. $0370–$03FF) I included those as well. Not something you should do when you design a font for real use.
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Re: Beyond 65K Characters

Post by Bhikkhu Pesala »

I use a Template Font with nearly 6,000 glyphs for my Overview font and the Display font in the Insert Characters dialogue. Some character sets like Greek Extended have a number of Reserved Characters. I use a composite glyph for those, and that serves as a warning not to try using those code-points.
Reserved Characters Greek Extended.png
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Re: Beyond 65K Characters

Post by Erwin Denissen »

That is very smart!
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Re: Beyond 65K Characters

Post by Alfred »

Alfred wrote:Very impressive, Erwin, but what's the explanation for the strange totals in some of the Unicode ranges (e.g. Greek and Coptic 144/134)? :?
Erwin Denissen wrote:There are a couple of gaps in those specific character ranges, and since I included whole blocks (e.g. $0370–$03FF) I included those as well. Not something you should do when you design a font for real use.
Sorry if my question was unclear. My understanding was that, for example, 'Latin-1 Supplement 96/128' means "the Latin-1 Supplement block comprises 128 characters, of which I have used 96". By that interpretation, 'Greek and Coptic 144/134' would mean "the Greek and Coptic block comprises 134 characters, of which I have used 144"! :lol: (The Insert Characters dialog tells me that the 'Greek and Coptic' block covers the range $0370 - $03FF, which is indeed 144 characters rather than 134.)
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Re: Beyond 65K Characters

Post by Erwin Denissen »

Well, the block size is indeed 144, but there are 10 not defined/assigned.

See:
http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U0370.pdf
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Re: Beyond 65K Characters

Post by Alfred »

Erwin Denissen wrote:Well, the block size is indeed 144, but there are 10 not defined/assigned.

See:
http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U0370.pdf
Thanks for the explanation (and the link) but if ten are not defined/assigned, how would you use them? And if you can't use them, shouldn't the list say 'Greek and Coptic 134/134'? The numbers do seem to be 'used/available', rather than 'block-size/available' or 'block-size/used'. :?
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Re: Beyond 65K Characters

Post by Bhikkhu Pesala »

You can use reserved characters, but if you do, later the Unicode consortium might assign them to something else and your font would then not show the glyph newly assigned to that code-point.
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Re: Beyond 65K Characters

Post by Alfred »

Bhikkhu Pesala wrote:You can use reserved characters, but if you do, later the Unicode consortium might assign them to something else and your font would then not show the glyph newly assigned to that code-point.
Thanks. So 'Greek and Coptic 144/134' really means "in the Greek and Coptic block, you have used 144 characters, of which 134 are currently assigned by the Unicode consortium".
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Re: Beyond 65K Characters

Post by Erwin Denissen »

Yes, that is correct.

But also confusing, so maybe we will make some changes in the future.
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Re: Beyond 65K Characters

Post by Alfred »

Thanks again. :)
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