Possible customizations

[bgvoisin]

Congratulations and thanks for this new package, which brings testfont.tex and nfssfont.tex to the modern font age!

The following is not really an issue, it's more user feedback.

Having used both testfont and nfssfont in the past, together with the output of fntsample, I couldn't help experimenting with the bells and whistles of unicodefonttable: first those accessible via key/values, then those requiring some (ugly) hacking of the package code.

Most of these tweaks only make sense when using hex-digits=block. I experimented with two versions:

• One keeping the present form of the table but replacing the row title "U+0000 - 000F" say by "U+000x", nfssfont-style, and simultaneously making the hex digits the same size; also making the block titles regular (not bold) and adding a bit of space between them and the next hex digits rows. I was also delighted to see the missing glyph did not need to be a glyph and could be a \rule.

• Another version adding, on top of the above, vertical lines between columns and horizontal lines between rows, again nfssfont-style.

For this second version I couldn't delete a "phantom" vertical line line between the first and second columns of the empty line before the first block title. My impression is that this is because, at the time the title is created by entering \\[-4pt] on line 389 of unicodefonttable.sty followed by the title itself, the empty row just before has already been assembled as empty-row-title & empty-hex-digits, and this cannot be put inside a \multicolumn after the fact.

I'm posting the results of these experiments here, in case that might provide ideas for future package options, key values, etc, as you see fit. For me this was mostly proof-of-concept stuff, to see how far the output of the package could be tweaked; and also to have the two versions of the table, with or without lines, side-by-side, to decide which one I liked best. (Right now I don't know.)

Actually, there's an interesting alternative design of font charts in Appendix D of amsfndoc.pdf, which adopts a middle ground: lines between the hex digits and the glyphs, but not between the glyphs themselves; and repeated hex digits top and bottom and left and right of the table for each font (here block).

Customized-Unicode-Tables.zip

[FrankMittelbach]

Thanks for your feedback, glad you like the package as such. There are quite a number of improvements and extensions that I could think of, but for now my decision is to give it a rest. It does more or less what is needed (in fact much more than I originally planned) and for the forseeable future I have other projects that are more important and need urgent attention. So I'll park it for some time in the future.

[bgvoisin]

The release of a new version of the Lucida OpenType fonts provided an incentive to go back to this, complete my earlier code and polish it. The result is a customization of unicodefonttable to produce unicode charts mixing the designs of Knuthian font tables and charts produced with fntsample. Charts from the STIX Two fonts documentation were also an inspiration.

I'm attaching this here in case it can be of any use. Sample charts for the STIX Two fonts are included.

Preparing these, with LuaTeX, I realized by inadvertently omitting Renderer=HarfBuzz that, when the ConTeXt font loader is used, all the character variants (small caps, oldstyle numbers, roundhand letters, etc.) accessed via OpenType features, and for maths also the prebuilt delimiters of increasing sizes, are shown in the Supplementary Private Use Area-A (U+F0000 and above). In all this way all the glyphs from a font can be inspected.

STIX Two Unicode Charts.zip