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Look at these characters, for example:

♥❤♡✰☆★☞☛❸➂✉

I've noticed that using different fonts (typefaces?) will lead to certain characters displaying properly, and others not.

And then in some cases, even the same font will display differently depending on the program being used. For example, using "Courier New" font in Notepad++ 6.9, I can see all of those characters fine. But using "Courier New" font in Netbeans IDE 8.0.2, only the first heart appears appropriately, and all of the other characters appear as empty white squares. (And yes, both programs are set to open the files as UTF-8.)

Note: Even though this isn't purely a programming question, I felt StackOverflow was the appropriate place to ask since few people other than developers understand text encoding. I'm on Windows 10.

I've looked at GUI: How can I find out if certain Unicode characters are supported? but don't think it helps me.

This answer seems to imply that I could look up each character individually, such as here, but that doesn't help me figure out which fonts can handle all of a set of certain characters, and it also doesn't seem to answer the second part of my question. I also think this answer might be relevant in finding fonts that support many characters (but not necessarily specific to the full set of characters I need).

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Ryan
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  • Why the downvote? (I think it would be helpful if people who downvote write why.) – Ryan May 27 '16 at 23:01
  • Ok, I've asked a better question here: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/37644558/netbeans-not-displaying-utf8-unicode-characters-emoticons-correctly – Ryan Jun 05 '16 at 17:07

2 Answers2

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Character Map on Windows and Font Book on Mac OS X both support viewing the glyphs of a particular font.

一二三
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  • Thanks, but this is the reverse angle from what I want. I want to specify a set of characters that I'd like to use and see a list of fonts that support the full set. – Ryan May 28 '16 at 04:35
  • Programmatically? With some tool? Do you have a set of fonts you want to inspect? Your question is very vague. – 一二三 May 28 '16 at 05:07
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This seems to be a two part question:

  • How can I know which programs will support certain unicode characters/glyphs that I want to use?
  • How can I know which fonts will support certain unicode characters/glyphs that I want to use?

The only solution I know of for the first question is to test. On Windows any application can access and use any of the installed fonts but that does mean that they take the opportunity to do that.

To resolve the second question, (on Windows) there is a free utility (BabelMap) to show which fonts will support any combination of characters. For example, in the screen shot below:

  • A string of characters (3 Greek, 3 Georgian, 3 Arabic) is selected from the listing of all Unicode characters, placing them in the Edit Buffer.

  • Then, by pressing Fonts... -> Font Coverage... -> Calculate Font Coverage a list of 13 fonts which supported all of the specified characters in Greek, Georgian and Arabic is produced.

    BabelMapExample

With regard to the first question, it's also worth noting that when that specific combination of characters is pasted into the Command Prompt window the Greek and Arabic characters are rendered, but the Georgian ones are not. And if it is pasted into a PowerShell window only the Greek characters are rendered. I can't think of any way to predict those outcomes in advance; as mentioned above, the only way to find out is to test:

cmdPrompt

cmd

skomisa
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