Dear X11 application developer,
I have created a public domain ISO 10646-1/Unicode version of the old
"fixed" font that comes with the X11 Windows System, or more precisely
the font
-misc-fixed-medium-r-semicondensed--13-120-75-75-c-60-iso8859-1
which is the 6x13 default font for a large number of X11 applications
and which is used by most people as their xterm font. My "*-iso10646-1"
version is a fully compatible drop-in replacement for the "*-iso8859-1"
version.
The current version of this font covers around 1900 characters,
including all European characters of the commonly used 8-bit character
sets plus a good selection of mathematical, phonetic alphabet, and other
symbols. It is already a big superset of the OpenType WGL4 Unicode
subset.
The font may be downloaded from
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/download/ucs-fonts.tar.gz
and more information is available from
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ucs-fonts.html
If you maintain some X11 terminal emulator, email software, news reader,
web browser, etc., I hope this font might encourage you to consider
adding Unicode support using the UTF-8 encoding to your application. The
UTF-8 MIME type is described in RFC 2044
ftp://ftp.funet.fi/mirrors/nic.nordu.net/rfc/rfc2044.txt
Using this single font, your application could be able to display not
only Unicode/UTF-8 messages, but with the conversion tables available on
ftp://ftp.unicode.org/Public/MAPPINGS/
ftp://dkuug.dk/i18n/WG15-collection/charmaps/
you can easily also support the hundreds of different 8-bit character
sets that are subsets of the characters this Unicode font.
The next X11 release will hopefully contain a number of "*-iso10646-1"
fonts, including this fixed font, and it would be nice if your
software could make use of them.
Markus
-- Markus G. Kuhn, Security Group, Computer Lab, Cambridge University, UK email: mkuhn at acm.org, home page: <http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/>
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