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

[Philipp Stephani]

But on Mac OS X, you don't need anything special: The built-in character map already shows which fonts contain the selected character.

Am 29.01.2010 um 23:52 schrieb 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
> Send reply to:	Unicode-based TeX for Mac OS X and other platforms 
> <xetex at tug.org>
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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
>> 
>> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
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