UNI-VGA is a Unicode VGA font for X11 and console. It is primarily intended to be the single source of fonts for console and for XDosEmu.
The font (u_vga16) is distributed in BDF format, and can be used in X11 as is. For use on console, the bdf2psf.pl script is included, which performs (BDF+SFM)->PSF conversion, using .sfm file as encoding table.
The package is distributed as gzipped tarball: uni-vga.tgz.
One of the aims while creating the font was its internal consistency. For example, accented glyphs shouldn't differ too much from unaccented ones, as it was in original IBM's VGA font. It also allowed to render Latin Extended Additional glyphs with two accents, which was impossible with IBM's accents' size.
This font was designed to be usable both in 9-pixel (VGA text console) and in 8-pixel (framebuffer console and X11) modes, with VGA 8th->9th pixel expansion accurately taken into account.
I didn't try to achieve a full Unicode coverage, and made only most used blocks, which I'm familiar with.
The blocks marked "Absent" are planned for inclusion in future releases.
Status is given according to the Unicode 3.0.
| Block | Status |
|---|---|
| 0000-007F Basic Latin | Complete |
| 0080-00FF Latin-1 Supplement | Complete |
| 0100-017F Latin Extended-A | Complete |
| 0180-024F Latin Extended-B | Complete |
| 0250-02AF IPA Extensions | Complete |
| 02B0-02FF Spacing Modifier Letters | Partial |
| 0300-036F Combining Diacritical Marks | Partial |
| 0370-03FF Greek | Complete |
| 0400-050F Cyrillic | Complete |
| 0530-058F Armenian | Complete |
| 0590-05FF Hebrew | Partial |
| 0600-06FF Arabic | Complete |
| 10A0-10FF Georgian | Absent |
| 1E00-1EFF Latin Extended Additional | Complete |
| 1F00-1FFF Greek Extended | Absent |
| 2000-206F General Punctuation | Complete |
| 2070-209F Superscripts and Subscripts | Complete |
| 20A0-20CF Currency Symbols | Complete |
| 2100-214F Letterlike Symbols | Complete |
| 2150-218F Number Forms | Complete |
| 2190-21FF Arrows | Complete |
| 2200-22FF Mathematical Operators | Complete |
| 2300-23FF Miscellaneous Technical | Very few glyphs |
| 2500-257F Box Drawing | Complete |
| 2580-259F Block Elements | Complete |
| 25A0-25FF Geometric Shapes | Complete |
| 2600-26FF Miscellaneous Symbols | Partial |
| FB00-FB4F Alphabetic Presentation Forms | Very few glyphs |
| FB50-FDFF Arabic Presentation Forms-A | Complete |
| FB70-FEFF Arabic Presentation Forms-B | Complete |
The UNI-VGA font can be distributed and modified freely, according to the X license.
The Basic Latin block was taken almost unchanged from DosEmu's vga.bdf. All the other blocks (except noted) were created mainly from scratch by me, Dmitry Bolkhovityanov.
Letters in the Hebrew block were taken unchanged from a public domain hebrew console font.
Glyphs in Arabic, Arabic Presentation Forms-A, Arabic Presentation Forms-B and U+262B Farsi symbol were kindly donated by Behdad Esfahbod.
Thanks to Birger Langkjer for idea, to Mark Leisher for his wonderful XmBDFEd, and to many others for their support.