Unicode VGA font

What's it

UNI-VGA is a Unicode VGA font for X11 and console. It is primarily intended to be the single source of fonts for console and for XDosEmu.

The font (u_vga16) is distributed in BDF format, and can be used in X11 as is. For use on console, the bdf2psf.pl script is included, which performs (BDF+SFM)->PSF conversion, using .sfm file as encoding table.

The package is distributed as gzipped tarball: uni-vga.tgz.

One of the aims while creating the font was its internal consistency. For example, accented glyphs shouldn't differ too much from unaccented ones, as it was in original IBM's VGA font. It also allowed to render Latin Extended Additional glyphs with two accents, which was impossible with IBM's accents' size.

This font was designed to be usable both in 9-pixel (VGA text console) and in 8-pixel (framebuffer console and X11) modes, with VGA 8th->9th pixel expansion accurately taken into account.

Unicode blocks' status

I didn't try to achieve a full Unicode coverage, and made only most used blocks, which I'm familiar with.

The blocks marked "Absent" are planned for inclusion in future releases.

Status is given according to the Unicode 3.0.

BlockStatus
0000-007F  Basic LatinComplete
0080-00FF  Latin-1 SupplementComplete
0100-017F  Latin Extended-AComplete
0180-024F  Latin Extended-BComplete
0250-02AF  IPA ExtensionsComplete
02B0-02FF  Spacing Modifier LettersPartial
0300-036F  Combining Diacritical MarksPartial
0370-03FF  GreekComplete
0400-050F  CyrillicComplete
0530-058F  ArmenianComplete
0590-05FF  HebrewPartial
0600-06FF  ArabicComplete
10A0-10FF  GeorgianAbsent
1E00-1EFF  Latin Extended AdditionalComplete
1F00-1FFF  Greek ExtendedAbsent
2000-206F  General PunctuationComplete
2070-209F  Superscripts and SubscriptsComplete
20A0-20CF  Currency SymbolsComplete
2100-214F  Letterlike SymbolsComplete
2150-218F  Number FormsComplete
2190-21FF  ArrowsComplete
2200-22FF  Mathematical OperatorsComplete
2300-23FF  Miscellaneous TechnicalVery few glyphs
2500-257F  Box DrawingComplete
2580-259F  Block ElementsComplete
25A0-25FF  Geometric ShapesComplete
2600-26FF  Miscellaneous SymbolsPartial
FB00-FB4F  Alphabetic Presentation FormsVery few glyphs
FB50-FDFF  Arabic Presentation Forms-AComplete
FB70-FEFF  Arabic Presentation Forms-BComplete

Copyright and acknowledgements

The UNI-VGA font can be distributed and modified freely, according to the X license.

The Basic Latin block was taken almost unchanged from DosEmu's vga.bdf. All the other blocks (except noted) were created mainly from scratch by me, Dmitry Bolkhovityanov.

Letters in the Hebrew block were taken unchanged from a public domain hebrew console font.

Glyphs in Arabic, Arabic Presentation Forms-A, Arabic Presentation Forms-B and U+262B Farsi symbol were kindly donated by Behdad Esfahbod.

Thanks to Birger Langkjer for idea, to Mark Leisher for his wonderful XmBDFEd, and to many others for their support.


Copyright © 2001 by Dmitry Yu. Bolkhovityanov