[XeTeX] Finding out if a font supports a particular Unicode character and using it

[hh]

Even not having a MAC, I would imagine that OpenOffice (free 
availability for MAC OS X) does allow to look even at the otf-fonts 
via the Menupoint "Insert -> Special Character" as it does in 
Windows.
hh


Date sent:	Fri, 29 Jan 2010 14:18:12 -0500
From:	Peter Baker <psb6m at virginia.edu>
To:	Unicode-based TeX for Mac OS X and other platforms 
<xetex at tug.org>
Subject:	Re: [XeTeX] Finding out if a font supports a particular 
Unicode
	character and using it
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> R (Chandra) Chandrasekhar wrote:
> >
> >
> > 1. How might I find out if a chosen font does indeed provide this 
> > symbol? I am on Kubuntu 9.10 and have kcharselect and gucharmap, but 
> > do not know of an efficient way of finding this out. Are there any 
> > utilities to do this efficiently?
> >
> This kind of question seems to me to come up pretty regularly on this 
> list. I don't know about kcharselect, but gucharmap is a poor tool for 
> this purpose, since you can't tell it to look *only* in a particular 
> font; it just silently substitutes whatever it can find in the system.
> 
> I thought I'd try to come up with a rough-and-ready script that would 
> search a directory tree for fonts containing a particular glyph. To use 
> this you need FontForge (with its python bindings): on Mac, Ubuntu and 
> most other Linuxes I believe the standard FontForge package should give 
> you what you need. You need to have the "find" utility on the system, so 
> Linux and Mac should both work fine.
> 
> Just copy this script to some place convenient (maybe /usr/local/bin), 
> make it executable, and invoke it like this
> 
> fontswith [path] glyph
> 
> [path] is the place to start looking: default is /usr/share/fonts. glyph 
> is either a glyphname (e.g. A, Edieresis) or a Unicode value in the form 
> U+2605. Fonts containing the glyph should be printed on stdout.
> 
> To keep from being distracted by warning messages from FontForge, stderr 
> is captured and errors are printed on stdout. Kludgy! But as I said, the 
> script is rough-and-ready.
> 
> In case attachments aren't allowed on this list, I've also posted the 
> script here: http://faculty.virginia.edu/OldEnglish/fontswith/fontswith.zip.
> 
> Peter
> 
>