Is there a tool on Linux that would allow me to preview Unicode fonts. Fontforge allows me to see the available glyphs and Unicode ranges, but the display is very crude. Gnome font viewer shows only the Latin range.
Ideally the tool would accept a string in a given encoding and then show the preview for the string.
Regards.
GNOME Character Map (installed on most gnome-friendly systems, try charmap) can give you what you need.
I'd recommend to use FontMatrix.
It's playground feature may suite your needs: area, where you can place text in any font/style and compare them.
site seems to be broken, but you can install it from your repository.
Related
Visual Studio Code does not seem to display Persian or Arabic scripts nicely in the terminal window. I can confirm that on Linux, but not sure about macOS or Windows. Instead of displaying right-to-left languages from right to left, it chains characters to each other from left to right. I tried changing its terminal to one with good Persian support like Konsole from the settings, but it didn't work. Is there a way to solve this or do we have to request project maintainers to add the support?
A screen shot is attached to show the problem.
I had the same problems use the package linked below. You can use it to first convert the text and copy that and paste it into the terminal for input. I made it to correctly organize the Arabic characters and display them correctly. The library supports,
Arabic, Farsi, and English characters and symbols.
Check it out.
https://www.npmjs.com/package/rtl-arabic
I would like to make a change to an open source Android app which uses the Bravura font implementing the Standard Music Font Layout (SMuFL) fonts. I am developing on Linux.
The app displays musical notes with things like
<string name="notef_c5"> == ==</string>
which is displayed like
I now need to change things and I would like to see what I am going to do, rather than semi-randomly changing the Unicode numbers and see what happens. So I installed the font on my Linux desktop from github, by simply copying the SVG that the app is using into my global font directory and that did not work (fc-cache said /usr/share/fonts/svg/Bravura: caching, new cache contents: 0 fonts, 0 dirs). The same procedure for the OTF did work. This could be a problem down the line, since the app is using slightly modified version of the SVG, so any hint on that could help, but it's secondary regarding the question.
In fact I want to use "something" to display the font, and I tried many things, including Charmap and FontManager (which is almost the same as FontViewer). Charmap is the worst, displaying basically every single font installed on the machine even if I select just the Bravura (why is that???!) -- FontManager does the same (???!) -- FontViewer is almost passable, in that (when the "Characters" tab is selected) it display empty squares for the characters not defined in Bravura. Therefore with lots of careful scrolling it displays the "actual things" I am looking for, but it does not show their unicode values, and it's an extenuating search of few actual characters in a huge ocean of empty squares. So it's a no go anyway.
Is it possible that the best solution is just to blindly type Unicode values as described in the docs and see what happens? I know, if I were running Windows or Mac I could use Dorico SE but more generally there must be a better way of using Unicode in Linux, perhaps built for other purposes?
If you’re looking for specific symbols in the SMuFL specification, the full list of glyphs is available on the SMuFL website. (Note that the fonts themselves know nothing about music typesetting, they are simply collections of shapes to be used by a typesetting program. Even the simple example you provided is a composite of several carefully scaled and positioned glyphs, and simply changing the character codes may or may not work as intended.)
If you’re looking for ways to input Unicode characters on Linux, see the many suggestions provided here: How to type special characters in Linux?
I'm using MS Office 2016 One note on windows 10.
On my PC, when I put box-drawing characters as like this : ┴┻┷┸┸┵┶┹┺┐┐┘├┬┬┤┴┼┣┳┼ on OneNote 2016 on Windows 10 those will be shown as ⍰⍰⍰⍰⍰⍰⍰⍰⍰┐┐┘⍰⍰⍰⍰⍰⍰⍰⍰⍰. Some of these seem like a missing glyph, but some of those are displayed properly, I've changed fonts but I still get the same result. I've also tested it on different office 2016's products but this only occurred on OneNote 2016.
Any possible solutions?
The reason why this doesn't work has nothing to do with the fonts as you've found. OneNote simply doesn't support unicode as has been reported here and the same issue, but more generally can be found also in this article.
As the following excerpt about the Windows 10 Edition(but should mostly apply to other versions as well) explains, a font fallback system is used for most applications to help them display characters not in a font.
All Windows 10 editions include fonts that provide broad language support, and the Windows platform includes font fallback mechanisms designed to ensure that text in any language always displays with legible glyphs rather than boxes. But some apps may take direct dependencies on particular fonts for displaying certain Unicode characters and do not utilize the font fallback mechanisms provided by Windows 10 systems"
(emphasis mine)
However this explanation neglects how Windows actually uses fonts and why a font fallback is necessary. The way that most applications in Windows handle text is:
Find the font it wants. Depending on the application it might look for a font file that comes bundled with it, or looks for the font in the Windows Font Directory if it's a commonly used font.
Displays the characters the chosen font supports. This contains characters to display, but not all of them, as there are 137,174 Unicode Characters and designing a single font for all of them is impossible because a font file simply can't contain that many characters.
However there are font families that are attempting to do this such as Google Noto.
Uses "font fallbacks" if the application uses them to display unsupported unicode. Windows knows that no font file can support all Unicode Characters so it has a system that inserts fonts for different languages and sections of Unicode.
Older applications such as OneNote may support sections or languages of this in a more manual way, but ultimately doesn't use the font fallback system, and so doesn't support all Unicode Characters. Which leads to the next step
Windows displays the "not defined" glyph this usually has the appearance of a rectangular box as you've seen, this can be "overridden" in a font, and depending on the OS or even application may appear as a black question mark.
The reason why OneNote has so many of these font issues is because it is a legacy program. In fact, the version you have stated you use, OneNote 2016 is being Sunsetted and as such will not be getting any more updates, so there is likely no fix for this beyond using a different application.
Disclaimer: I am not an expert nor will I pretend to be, I hope that this represents an accurate explanation, but cannot guarantee it. I may turn this into a community wiki later, but I plan to research this topic more to verify it.
Some Background here:
I've downloaded this example and made it run on my Ubuntu. Everything's fine. I put my own OpenType font into the project and it works fine too! I made sure that HarfBuzz supports my font and my language.Now I need to go further.
I need some guide here:
In the above example,three kinds of language each has it's own font to support the display. I mean,these three languages is rendered separately(as to my understanding of the code).
So, how to make HarfBuzz to select the correct font when many kinds of language are mixed together and render them at once? I mean,without making a font file that supports all languages in the world.
In this example,Chinese script is vertically displayed(which is just as I want),but if I make the Latin script's text_directions to HB_DIRECTION_TTB,which is of course not what I want. I want the whole word 'LATIN' to rotated 90 degree.
So, how can I achieve that? how to make that happen without breaking anything about Chinese layout?
3 .Last but not least,after solving the above problems, I want to make a Text Editor to display and edit many languages at the same time,same place. I don't know if I have to do some work on HarfBuzz or FreeType or implement a text editor that supports this complex text layout? Is there any example that I can refer to ?
Thanks in advance for help.
HarfBuzz is doing shaping just on same script and directionality, you should first split your text, guess or find language and direction of that chunk (using ICU or smt else) then send it to a shaper. Generally on Linux for finding right installed font for a script, you can use fontconfig.
I do not know, I suggest making separate question for that.
Making a text editor starting from shaper is not easy task. You should do bidi, line wrapping and ... that all have their challenges. I suggest use higher level abstraction (pango). For instance browsers doing a lot to support these.
Are there any rich-text editors that have Vi(m) keybindings? Specifically, something like Word where I can compose a document with colors, headings, et al. but use Vi(m) bindings to move around and compose?
So if you have to use MS Word and want vim key bindings, there is an add on, but if you are not bound to that I would def. go for LaTeX + the vim latex suite.
Are you familiar with Latex?
Simply put it allows you to format your documents in plain text using tags or commands.
You then "compile" your document into the final format .pdf,.ps, etc.
Ex:
\documentclass{article}
\title{Cartesian closed categories and the price of eggs}
\author{Jane Doe}
\date{September 1994}
\begin{document}
\maketitle
Hello world!
\end{document}
This will allow you to write in vim, but still get professional non plain text output for your documents.
If you like Markdown or Latex, you could use the free open source Rstudio editor, with VIM-mode enabled. Export as either Word, PDF, or HTML etc.
Download Rstudio:
https://www.rstudio.com/products/RStudio/#Desktop
Read about markdown:
http://rmarkdown.rstudio.com/
If you wish to use vim for text editing, but want to, for example have text in different colors, bold it and such ... you can use Txtfmt plugin. It enables you, by using special characters, to "prettify" plain text files a little. They can look quite nice, and it comes handy if you're used to vim, and are, for example, writing documentation for your programs which you'll later just get in word, and make an adjustment or two, and ship off.
If you want to (or have to) stay with Word and don't want to shell out $100 for a ViEmu license, you can try using this AutoHotKey script for providing some basic vi-like functionality. The repo linked also provides a standalone exe to get the same without using AutoHotKey.
There are many good reasons to ditch word entirely, but sometimes that's just not an option :(
The Txtfmt plugin definitely provides the functionality you are looking for. It's a bit like having "rich text" capability for plain text in Vim.
Txtfmt (The Vim Highlighter)
Screenshots
The latest version supports 8 configurable foreground and background colors, as well as all combinations of bold, underline, italic, etc... The highlighting is token-based, but the tokens are rendered invisible by the syntax, and can be inserted with very convenient and intuitive mappings, which don't require you to remember anything: e.g., "bold-underline" could be specified with a string such as bu or ub. The version under development even supports visual maps, which will permit you to select some text and say (for example) "Make this text red, bold-italic", and have the plugin handle insertion/removal of the appropriate tokens automatically. (It's really quite simple and intuitive, however, even with the non-visual mappings.)
Although the plugin is highly configurable, the default settings are appropriate for most users, and the author is more than happy to answer any setup or usage questions...
There's a way of configuring Abiword to use vi key bindings
You can use the text editor of your choice with vim keys (vim, emacs, sublime, atom, vscode ,etc.) and write your document in markdown. Then use an open source tool called pandoc to translate it into almost any other markup language that you want. It is possible to compile your document to rich text formats including MS Word or even MS Powerpoint.
You can costumize your output by using a template.
Pandoc has extensive documentation and uses a richer markup syntax that allows you to do pretty much anything you want with the text. It is being actively developed by the community. Almost any major text editor has a few plugins for pandoc too.
You can use GlobalVim.
It can simulate vim modes and commands in most editing area.