Best Unicode Fonts for Programer

What is the Criterions for Best Font?

What do i mean “best”? The font should be:

• Monospace.
• Clearly distinguish {digit zero,capital letter O, small letter o } 0 O o and {digit one, lowercase letter L, capital case letter I} 1 l I
• Have lots math symbols and commonly used Unicode character available.

There are lots fonts designed for programers, but as soon as you started to use some math symbols or Unicode symbols, they don't work well.

Unicode Character Sample

Copy and Paste the following into your editor, see how your font do.

For more examples of Unicode characters, see:

• Unicode: Math Symbols ∑ ∫ π² ∞
• Unicode: Keyboard Symbols ⌘ ↵ ⌫

Best Monospace Fonts for Unicode

Best monospace fonts for unicode are:

• JuliaMono https://juliamono.netlify.app
• DejaVu Sans Mono https://dejavu-fonts.github.io/
• Iosevka https://typeof.net/Iosevka/

• Microsoft Windows 10: Consolas (builtin)
• MacOS: Menlo (builtin)

Font for Emoji 😸 👍

see Download Free Unicode Fonts

Which Font Has All Unicode Chars?

No single font has ALL Unicode chars. At best, they contain all chars in the Basic Multilingual Plane, meaning, the most commonly used ~65 thousand chars. (That is, 16 bits).

Font Substitution Tech

{Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, Linux} all have Font substitution technology. When a char in the current font doesn't have a glyph, the system search for the glyph in other available fonts. So, this way, each font can be specially designed for a particular language or purpose, while you can still display many Unicode symbols in the same page.

As of 2021, today's font contain lots unicode, and also font substitution tech is robust. You can use Microsoft Windows Consolas or MacOS Menlo to display text with lots math symbols and it usually looks fine. But if you really use a lot math symbols, and want all characters to be aligned, JuliaMono, DejaVu Sans, Iosevka are the solution.

StackOverflow answers: “How does a Unicode character get mapped to a glyph in a font?”: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3582944/how-does-a-unicode-character-get-mapped-to-a-glyph-in-a-font

Programer Inane Obsession with Font