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Please add U+2714 thru U+2718

Open ferenczy opened this issue 8 years ago β€’ 8 comments

Question: Have characters U+2714 (Heavy check mark) and U+2717 (Ballot x) been removed from the recent version of the font?

Explanation: I'm using both characters in my shell prompt (the first one signals that the last command completed successfully, the later signals the opposite). Suddenly, most likely after a font update, I have just squares instead of those two characters in my shell, so I'm wondering were those characters removed from the font and if yes then why?

ferenczy avatar Oct 02 '17 17:10 ferenczy

I don't have an answer, but I have a guess... Could your system (or terminal) be using a "fallback font" to supply missing Unicode characters, and these symbols never existed inside Source Code Pro in the first place? Then maybe later on, the font that was supplying the characters got updated/removed.

I don't know the history/status of Source Code Pro, so I could be entirely wrong. πŸ˜…

jamen avatar Oct 02 '17 18:10 jamen

U+2713 βœ“ (CHECK MARK) is part of Source Code Pro, not U+2714 βœ” (HEAVY CHECK MARK). I don’t think U+2717 has ever been part of the family.

frankrolf avatar Oct 02 '17 19:10 frankrolf

@jamen Yep, it also came to my mind since my terminal (ConEmu) has such feature (called Alternative font), I have used it to temporarily "fix" my issue, but it was disabled before. I have backups of ConEmu's configuration files so I could check if it was enabled before. It wasn't.

ferenczy avatar Oct 02 '17 19:10 ferenczy

@frankrolf I have just checked an older version 2.010R and it's the same.

So I really don't know what happened on my system. I didn't change anything and suddenly I had just squares instead of characters U+2714 and U+2717.

May I ask font maintainer(s), would it be possible to implement those characters, ideally from U+2713 to U+2718? I think it's quite useful for developer related stuff.

ferenczy avatar Oct 02 '17 19:10 ferenczy

This is precisely why font fall back is a double-edge sword. On one edge is the advantage of displaying arbitrary characters. On the other edge is not really knowing with what font a particular character is being rendered. Obviously something happened with font fallback, because the glyph for the characters in question were never included in this typeface family.

kenlunde avatar Oct 02 '17 20:10 kenlunde

Those characters are part of Zapf Dingbats, which is one of the most common dingbat fonts. Your OS should come with a font that at least supports the Unicode range (AFAIK, most OSes do) – perhaps you did some font purging?

frankrolf avatar Oct 02 '17 20:10 frankrolf

Guys, I wrote I didn't have the font fallback enabled for my terminal before. I don't know if operating system (Windows 7) has anything like that, I haven't explicitly use anything like that. I'm just trying to find out how is it possible it has been working before (without the font fallback) and why it stopped. I have fonts which implement those characters, still I think it would be useful for Source Code Pro to have such characters also.

ferenczy avatar Oct 03 '17 11:10 ferenczy

So to keep this issue relevant, I would change it into a feature request: would it be possible to implement characters from U+2714 to U+2718, please? (U+2713 is already implemented)

ferenczy avatar Oct 03 '17 11:10 ferenczy