about unicode characters:

users
#1

hi every one.
thanks so much for spending time and helping me to use libreoffice properly.
is there a solution for libreoffice to recognize the unicode incoding
and open them properly like utf-8 documents?
because open office has unicode utf-7 and utf-8 and libreoffice has
utf-7, utf-8 and utf-16.
whats the difference between unicode and unicode utf-8?
thanks and god bless you all.

#2

nasrin khaksar wrote:

hi every one.
thanks so much for spending time and helping me to use libreoffice properly.
is there a solution for libreoffice to recognize the unicode incoding
and open them properly like utf-8 documents?
because open office has unicode utf-7 and utf-8 and libreoffice has
utf-7, utf-8 and utf-16.
whats the difference between unicode and unicode utf-8?
thanks and god bless you all.

Unicode is a standard for representing text in a form which can be used by computers (i.e. a series of numbers). It basically assigns a number to each of thousands of characters used in different languages. It also defines several encodings which can be used to represent those numbers in memory or on disk; UTF-8 and UTF-16 are probably the most common. When dealing with plain text files, you need to know which encoding is used, not just that it's "Unicode", in order to read it correctly.

There's a lot more detail, e.g. here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode

Mark.

#3

The one thing that confuses some users is the fact that Unicode fonts are not alike displaying the characters. Is you look at them using the "insert special characters" option in Writer, you will find that each font will have a different set of Unicode characters available. I just seems to me that most of the ones I have tried just do not want to include the "full set" of the available characters. Arial Unicode MS seems to me to have the most Unicode characters included within the font file. It would be nice to find a free font that includes all the characters that the Arial Unicode font includes.

#4

do not want to include the "full set" of the available characters.

A font with all Unicode glyphs in it, would contain 2^17 different
glyphs, but current font format definitions restrict the size of a font
to 2^16 different glyphs.

Arial Unicode MS seems to me to have the most Unicode characters

There are just over 50,000 glyphs in Arial, whilst Unifont has just
under 60,000 glyphs.

IOW, if you absolutely positively have to have a pan-unicode font, then
Unifont is the way to go.

jonathon

#5

In the Synaptic Package Manager, it shows that I have the Unifont installed, but I do not see a font named as that in my .font folder. I wonder where the font was re-installed to, since I had it installed via the package manager already, but could not find the name "Unifont" listed.

When I went online to the Unifont "project", I downloaded the full 12 MB version TTF file. When I looked at it in the font viewer, it was very "boxy" - actually each character is made up with boxes. Both the Web site and the info in the package manager stated the boxiness of the font.

I still wonder what is the best looking unicode font with somewhere near the number of characters/glyphs that Arial Unicode has.

#6

I use several of the fonts listed on this page:
http://www.alanwood.net/unicode/fonts.html
I only used the Windows fonts, but they have also fonts for Linux/Unix/MacOSX.
HTH,
Jean-Louis