GNU Unifont is a font providing complete coverage of the Unicode 6.3 Basic Multilingual Plane (Plane 0). This latest version provides glyphs that were finalized on 2013-12-15. See https://savannah.gnu.org/projects/unifont/ for more background information on Unifont.
The new source tarball, plus several pre-built font formats and a bitmap image of the entire font, can be downloaded at ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/unifont/unifont-6.3.20131215/. The most significant change in this release is the addition of scripts to convert Unifont's native hexadecimal string format to and from Portable Network Graphics (PNG) files for graphical editing. Latest NEWS Entry ============== 2013-12-15: Release 6.3.20131215 This version introduces unihex2png and unipng2hex, two Perl scripts that Andrew Miller wrote based upon Paul Hardy's unihex2bmp.c and unibmp2hex.c programs. These new scripts allow conversion between the Unifont .hex format and Portable Network Graphics (PNG) files for graphical editing. With this addition, more graphics programs can be used to edit Unifont glyphs. unihex2png and unipng2hex also support glyphs that are 24 or 32 pixels tall, in addition to Unifont's default 16 pixels tall. Roman Czyborra's hexdraw and hex2bdf Perl scripts were modified to also support glyphs that are 16, 24, or 32 pixels tall. These changes have not been fully tested, and at this point are considered experimental. There are no plans to add this multi-height support to unihex2bmp.c and unibmp2hex.c. The package now contains a "doc/" directory, with documentation in Texinfo format. Files in the "man/" directory were updated for consistency, especially in noting that all programs are covered under GPLv2+ now. In addition to "unifont-*.*" font files, this package now also creates "unifont_sample-*.*" files. These "Unifont Sample" fonts contain combining circles, and four-digit hexadecimal glyphs for unassigned code points and Private Use Area glyphs. Because of the inclusion of combining cirlces, "Unifont Sample" font versions are only intended for illustrating individual glyphs, not for general-purpose writing. The two generated fonts are unifont_sample-*.bdf and unifont_sample-*.ttf. The TTF file contains SBIT glyphs, not outlined TrueType glyphs like "unifont-*.ttf". The font versions (BDF, PCF, and TTF) now contain copyright and version information. This will help identify outdated versions of a font in the future. hex2bdf now accepts a version string and a copyright string as command line arguments. To simplify this package supporting two versions of Unifont ("Unifont" and "Unifont Sample"), hex2bdf now accepts a font name as a command line argument. This will streamline adding additional fonts in the future as part of this same package. Note that the old XLFD font name "unifont" has now been capitalized to "Unifont". Many XLFD properties have been added to the BDF version of Unifont in addition to font version and copyright XLFD properties. At least some of these are carried over to the PCF version during conversion with bdftopcf. This has solved an issue with grub-mkfont and FreeType for converting the PCF font into a GRUB version. Some glyphs were redrawn: the Capricorn sign, several CJK Radicals Supplement ideographs, and several Armenian letters. The Armenian letters were modified with the new unihex2png and unipng2hex programs. Further details are in the ChangeLog file. Paul Hardy
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