Miscellany № 113: an Asterisk without an asterisk

More links! Who knew the internet was going to be so busy? Roel Nieskens, who writes at Pixel Ambacht, has taken a look at what it takes to render every character in the Unicode standard and what we can learn if we do that. I won’t steal Roel’s thunder, but the headlines are, essentially, that there is no one font to rule them all; that Chinese script contains a lot of characters; and that Unicode is full of oddities which have accrued over the thirty-odd years of its existence. Roel goes into the details at his site, and if you’re feeling adventurous you can visit his follow-up toot to get the source code with which he drew all 1,114,111 characters. If you’re feeling even more adventurous, this reply from Google engineer Thomas Steiner contains a string that will render all of Unicode’s characters right from your browser’s address bar: Read more →