Monospace Unicode font

Question

Can anybody please tell me the monospace font that covers most of the unicode characters If not then a monospace font that contains most of the european language character set ?

Answer 1

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

Answer 2

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

Answer 3

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:

• Lucida Sans Unicode
• Fixedsys Excelsior
• Everson Mono
• DejaVu Sans Mono

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

Answer 4

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.