[medgno]

Systems have a way of finding fall-back fonts. At least on OS X (err, macOS) they will satisfy glyph requests in order from the font you specify, some built-in fonts, and then any fonts that have the required glyphs. Finally, a "last resort" font is used to fill in any remaining glyphs[1].

A result of this is that if you ask for a character such as "𓀴" (U+13034 EGYPTIAN HIEROGLYPH A044) in a monospace font, the symbol you get back can be variable width.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallback_font

[the8472]

I have a font for that, but the character is unreadably small while it's perfectly fine for latin characters.

Many other unicode symbols also suffer from this problem. E.g. ␀ is the printable version of the unprintable NUL (\0) control character, but it's so small at 13.3px / 10pt CSS font size that it's difficult to distinguish from the other control pictures.

␀ ␁ ␂ ␃ ␄ ␅ ␆ ␇ ␈ ␉ ␊ ␋ ␌ ␍ ␎ ␏ ␐ ␑ ␒ ␓ ␔ ␕ ␖ ␗ ␘ ␙ ␚ ␛ ␜ ␝ ␞ ␟ ␠ ␡

How those look on display w/o pixel scaling: https://i.imgur.com/lAAyjXu.png

[sscotth]

Imagine if ﷽ was sized to a monospace font.

[chme]

For someone who can't see this glyph, here some different renders:

http://i.imgur.com/g7igcwP.png

[chme]

In the name of god, that has to be the most complex glyph I have ever seen.

[acqq]

> In the name of god, that has to be the most complex glyph

And actually it is in the Arabic "name of God," thanks!

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D8%A8%D8%B3%D9%85_%D8%A7%D9%...

I didn't know there's a whole ligature as a single code point U+FDFD available, thanks sscotth. The code point is also easy to remember.

(It, accidentally, also most probably represents the words first said by the Orlando shooter when calling 911, when the translation in the transcription is compared.)

Is this the biggest glyph in Unicode?

[legulere]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biangbiang_noodles#/media/Fi...

Biang from Biang biang noodles is also fairly complex (though not supported by Unicode)

[ojii]

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0d/Taito_1....

"appearance of a dragon in flight"

[outworlder]

Just tried it in Emacs, renders just fine

(M-x ucs-insert FDFD)

[lucaspiller]

They are also very small on my computer (Chrome on OS X 10.11.5, external non-'Retina' monitor), but they are vertically aligned instead of diagonal:

http://i.imgur.com/kKfLYgx.jpg

Interestingly in Safari the hieroglyph is shown (still small though), I wonder why Chrome can't find it?

[rbanffy]

Funny how the OS won't even try some of them...

http://imgur.com/oQEHbA7

[heinrich5991]

FWIW on my screen, they're really distinguishable: https://i.imgur.com/IdUK8MV.png.

[j4_james]

That looks like your browser is somehow misinterpreting the character set of the page. What you're seeing appears to be something like code page 437 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_page_437) rather than unicode.

What browser/os are you using? Is it possible you're going through a proxy that is altering the HTTP headers?

[yrro]

Could be that he has a font that provides code page 437-like outlines for those codepoints.

[the8472]

The spade symbol[0] is codepoint 9824, the acknowledge control picture[1] (␆) is codepoint 9222. They shouldn't be using the same glyph.

[0] http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/2660/index.htm [1] http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/2406/index.htm

[chme]

With DejaVu they are distinguishable enough:

http://i.imgur.com/WemOI28.png

[petepete]

On Android N with Chrome 51

http://m.imgur.com/tKnyPad

[umanwizard]

Ah, so is that why emojis don't display correctly in vim? They spill out of the character's bounding box...

[legulere]

That sounds more like a problem of your terminal.

The basic problem is that Unicode characters (which may consist of as many codepoints as you like) have varying width. For instance Chinese has characters that are displayed over a width of two normal monospace characters.

See this hacker news post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10206380

So the problem with emojis is that they aren't really specified to be full width or half width characters: https://ianrenton.com/blog/adventures-in-emoji/

[legulere]

Apparently emoji representations are defined to be wide by unicode 9 now: http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr11/tr11-31.html#Modificatio...

[pavanky]

And I see a boxes (on linux)

[benkuykendall]

That's not an inherent problem with GNU/Linux. Shows up fine for me because I have "ttf-ancient-scripts" (https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/ttf-ancient-fonts/) installed.

[kalleboo]

On my Mac it gets displayed with "Noto Sans Egyptian Hieroglyhs" which appears to be included in the system (/Library/Application Support/Apple/Fonts/Language Support) but can be downloaded for other platforms from here https://www.google.com/get/noto/

[aarongolliver]

Same on win10/chrome. Works on edge though.

[pcr0]

I see a box with these two lines inside it:

013

034

OSX 10.11.4