complete, monospaced Unicode font?

Question

I'm looking for a good programming font that lets me add comments and string literals in Unicode, usually Japanese and Chinese along with some Latin and Cyrillic languages.

So far the situation seems to be "complete, monospace, free, pick 2" and Google is failing me with this (maybe because there are no good ones?).

The best I found is Arial Unicode but it's not monospace, which is a big nuisance for me and the editors I use. Not to mention Python indentation when I'm coding Python.

(Links, edits are welcome)

Ken_66798 · Answer

Unicode is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly hugely mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you might think it's a long way down the codepage to ü, but that's just peanuts to Unicode.

I really doubt there's any font in the world (monospaced or not) that has "complete" Unicode. The best you can do is find a few monospaced fonts that, together, cover the space you're interested in, and make sure your editor is set up to use them.

user_3978 · Answer

The best I've found is DejaVu Sans Mono which is a Unicode expansion of Bitstream's Vera Sans Mono.

I'm not sure there are any 'complete' fonts, so I think you'll have to deal with a patchwork of fonts.

user_287424 · Answer

GNU Unifont is a monospaced, bitmapped font with complete coverage of the Basic Multilingual Plane as defined in Unicode 5.1. It is also avaiable in True Type format.

teknohippy_60152 · Answer

How about Consolas? Should be lying around on most windows boxes by now.

If not it can be downloaded here:

http://www.microsoft.com/down...lang=en

It does look ugly without ClearType enabled though.

GvS_11492 · Answer

Before Consolas, I always used Andale Mono as my programmer font. There's a free download available.

user_43582 · Answer

Actually I find monospaced fonts to be a nuisance when I have to read them so I use Tahoma or even Georgia for my source code. I have a very verbose coding style (an instance of type AstractModemConnector is named abstractModemConnector) so my source code looks almost like English and is perfectly readable with a proportional font.

complete, monospaced Unicode font?

9 Answers