Unicode version of X11 "fixed" font available

From: Markus Kuhn (Markus.Kuhn@cl.cam.ac.uk)
Date: Thu Oct 15 1998 - 16:17:06 EDT


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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