Question about the default font in p9p

[Kevin Smallman]

Hi again,

I assumed the default font in p9p, used in 9term etc. would be capable of displaying unicode characters like the smiley face, chess pieces etc.  I'm sure it did when I used plan9 itself.

However, I'm seeing a lot of the weird face wearing sunglasses (that's what it looks like to me) where many characters should be - I take it that's what you see when there isn't a glyph for the character requested.

The $font variable is set to /usr/local/plan9/font/lucm/unicode.9.font

So, the manual says: Unicode includes every character for which appropriate-sized images exist on the system.  

Are those images somehow missing in p9p?

[Jacob Vosmaer]

That face is some sort of Bell Labs in-joke. http://spinroot.com/pico/pjw.html

For what it's worth, I use a Mac and in Acme I use Verdana. I'm not sure if you can change the font in 9term?

Op wo 3 mrt. 2021 om 15:02 schreef Kevin Smallman <pipel...@gmail.com>:

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[sqweek E.]

You can definitely change the font in p9p. I don't have the details in front of me but IIRC it looks at the "font" env var.

I remember tweaking the font definitions at some point to improve coverage for more obscure glyphs; I think musical sharps/flats were my use case. You won't necessarily find the glyph with an equivalent font face which I suspect is why the unicode coverage is limited by default.

-sqweek

On 3 Mar 2021, at 23:23, Jacob Vosmaer <con...@jacobvosmaer.nl> wrote:



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[Ethan Gardener]

On Wed, Mar 3, 2021, at 2:02 PM, Kevin Smallman wrote:
> Hi again,
>
> I assumed the default font in p9p, used in 9term etc. would be capable of displaying unicode characters like the smiley face, chess pieces etc. I'm sure it did when I used plan9 itself.
>
> However, I'm seeing a lot of the weird face wearing sunglasses (that's what it looks like to me) where many characters should be - I take it that's what you see when there isn't a glyph for the character requested.

You're right, it's the usual glyph for unknown characters in Plan 9, although converted fonts have something else. It's PJW's face; the story is hilarious!
http://spinroot.com/pico/pjw.html

> The $font variable is set to /usr/local/plan9/font/lucm/unicode.9.font
>
> So, the manual says: Unicode includes every character for which appropriate-sized images exist on the system.
>
> Are those images somehow missing in p9p?

The problem is lucm and other fonts with PJW's face were released many years ago, Unicode has grown since then. All the present-day Unicode emoticons are newer than the fonts, and I think new languages have been added.

You can increase coverage by editing the font files. They're plain-text mappings from character ranges to subfont files. You can add lines; there are lots of examples in lucm/unicode.9.font already. See font(7)