Number of glyphs in a font

[Dave Crosby]

Ariel and Times New Roman both contain 1,674 glyphs.

What is the practical maximum number of glyphs that should be used in a font?

[vanisaac]

2^16.

Unicode fonts are the largest out there, and can contain 65,536 glyphs (maybe only 65,535). This is not a theoretical limit, it is the architectural glyph limit of font files, be they TrueType, OpenType, etc.

[Bhikkhu Pesala]

Define "practical." It depends rather a lot on what the purpose of the font is. If the glyphs are complex symbols and graphics the practical limit to the number of glyphs may be only a few hundred.

Most of my fonts contain about 2,000 glyphs including lots of Latin accented glyphs, Greek glyphs, and a comprehensive range of symbols.

[vanisaac]

My most recent font currently contains 1606 glyphs, representing contextual forms and ligatures of around 160 characters.

In response to your private message, I'm still not exactly sure what you mean. If you are asking about keyboard access, it all depends on what you consider access to be. You can use Alt combinations to access pretty much any code point, but if the font doesn't contain proper mappings or OpenType style glyph selection, or a program doesn't support the glyph selection, then a good number of glyphs in a font can be absolutely unavailable to you.

If you don't like Alt+ availability (I hate it), I am currently creating a keyboard with MSKLC that can access every Latin glyph in the Unicode Latin Extended -A, -B, -C, and Additional blocks, in addition to complete Devanagari coverage, Hiragana and Katakana, Greek, basic Cyrillic, Hebrew, Arabic, Mongolian, PhagsPa, Cherokee, Braille, and the block of characters I am writing a proposal for. I also would like to extend the coverage to include about 2000 of the most commonly used Japanese Kanji. So what is the limit? Well, by my calculations, you can theoretically make a keyboard that can access 141,752 characters, not that you'd ever want to try to use it. There are currently 107,361 characters allocated in Unicode 5.2, so that leaves you with 34,391 Private Use code points you could access in addition to the full Unicode repertoire. Just gotta make the keyboard...

[William]

The following web page is interesting.

http://www.code2000.net/code2000_page.htm

It includes the following.

quote

Code2000 is one of the larger fonts available and the latest build has over 60000 glyphs.

end quote

Code 2000 is a famous font.

The following web pages are also of interest.

http://www.code2000.net/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_2000

William Overington

31 May 2010

[Dave Crosby]

I have solved my problem. It is the Word Processor!
(But I am very interested in Vanisaac's keyboard!
BTW, thanks for all replies!)

My friend using Microsoft Word (sorry, I don't know what version) was unable to access the Private Use area.

I experimented with my WordPerfect 11 and found the same problem, and more.
Using MainType, it pasted in many symbols from Times New Roman rather than the selected font,
AND "?" instead of the PUA glyphs. Alt + whatever often returned unexpected results, and in the PUA
seems only to return -, +, or nothing.

PUA-1.jpg (81.11 KiB) Viewed 14147 times

Switching to Sun Star Office, The "problem" disappeared.
I don't even need a special keyboard.

PUA-2.jpg (55.96 KiB) Viewed 14147 times

[William]

My friend using Microsoft Word was unable to access the Private Use area.

That is interesting.

The version of Microsoft Word that we have here is Word 97 (bought in about 1998, so it is far from being the latest version of Word) and I have regularly been using the Insert Symbol... facility to insert Private Use Area characters into text documents.

William Overington

31 May 2010