Monospace Unicode font

Nearly every font nowadays covers at least Latin, Greek and Cyrillic. And enough of Latin to support most European languages.

However, there can't be a single font covering most of Unicode, as OpenType is limited to 65536 glyphs and there are more code points assigned so far. Also it's a common misconception that a single font for as many scripts as possible is a Good Thing™. It's not, actually. Remember that for the font to work other things must be in place as well: properly defined diacritics support (so combining accents actually appear above/below the base characters and not somewhere next to them), precomposed glyphs for some scripts so the rendering engine can use them properly, this includes Arabic and and Indic scripts, ...

It's a major undertaking and as such it's not surprising that pretty much the only fonts covering large portions of Unicode are last-resort fonts, intended to be used when no other font exists to display something. As a fallback mechanism, but never as a first choice. The preferred way is actually to let the rendering engine sort out script support for fonts and not try to cram it all into a single font. See also Michael Kaplan's take on this: Arial Unicode MS effectively [bites|sucks|blows] .

Still, if you're only looking for glyph support:

• Fixedsys Excelsior
• Everson Mono
• DejaVu Sans Mono
• Roboto Mono

Those fonts are pretty large already. But as noted above, don't count on correct workings of complex scripts or typography.

There's the GNU Unifont project, which more or less has this as its goal.

For those of you who were in need of an overview to make sense of many good suggestions here and elsewhere: here is something I made.

I downloaded 39 monospaced fonts I found on the internet and used Fontkit to get the number of supported Unicode points. I manually added the supported styles. I hope this helps!

The Unicode font called Monospace will cover pretty much all European characters, but lacks the Asian ones.

Consolas is a modern monospace font shipped with Micosoft's products.

An example of a font that covers a wide range of Unicode characters is Arial Unicode shipped with Microsoft Office products.

The ONLY standard install font I have ever found that works with a good range of unicode blocks encoded is...

FONT="-misc-fixed-medium-r-*-*-15-*-75-75-c-90-iso10646-1"
BFONT="-misc-fixed-bold-r-*-*-15-*-75-75-c-90-iso10646-1"

I set Xresources to...

XtDefaultFont:  -misc-fixed-bold-r-*-*-15-*-75-75-c-90-iso10646-1
XTerm*font:     -misc-fixed-medium-r-*-*-15-*-75-75-c-90-iso10646-1
XTerm*boldFont: -misc-fixed-bold-r-*-*-15-*-75-75-c-90-iso10646-1

This Font includes Glyphs for...

Arrows U+2190
Mathematical U+2200
Technical U+2300
Miscellaneous U+2400
Graphics U+2500
Miscellaneous Symbols U+2600
Dingbats U+2700
Braile U+2800

I have tried to use the newer, GTK and Truetype unicode fonts. And while they implement a larger range of glyphs, including he latest emoji. But they mostly suffer when you simply want a fixed-width font that really is FIXED-WIDTH!

The Graphics and Mathematical Blocks for example often do not work with character extensions across multiple lines. You often only have to look at Extended Braces, to see the font and application falling flat on its face, with symbol characters not lining up properly.

Add to that the applications often leave gaps between characters or between lines, making characters 'fuzzy' from over use of scaling and anti-aliasing in the rendering, or not implementing the combining properities for the unicode block "Combining Diacritical Marks for Symbols U+20D0 - U+20FF" and you see the newer fonts are basically a sorry mess!

Basically XTerms, and X-Window "fixed" font (as above) seemed to have put in the time and thought put into making the font work properly as a whole.

Big thanks to Markus Kuhn for such a great effort!

For my notes from researching this see... http://www.ict.griffith.edu.au/anthony/info/data/utf8-demo.txt

Noto Sans Mono, https://www.google.com/get/noto/#sans-mono , I changed my TeXStudio editor font to that, it has the variety unicode chars I use.