Libology Blog

Jan 24 2009

Fonterrific

A recent post, and the resulting discussion, on Metafilter has put me in a Unicode font frenzy. A few links of note from there and elsewhere:

decodeunicode.org is a wiki-based collection of Unicode characters. You can browse as well as search through the character sets. There is a lot to see here, and you may get into your own font frenzy; you have been warned.
FileFormat.info has a Unicode section that provides some great resources, including a UTF-8 Browser Test Page.
Unicode.org, the official Unicode organization, has a great comprehensive Code Charts.
Sil.org has an excellent introduction to the Unicode standard, as well as a collection of downloadable fonts and software, including my favorite font for print: Gentium.
An additional font family that offers great Unicode support is DejaVu, which was recommended in the MetaFilter comments.
Two interesting characters I had not encountered before: Reference Mark (※) and Irony Mark (؟).

As someone who has worked with an ILS that didn’t have Unicode support, which was then upgraded to support Unicode, and then changed jobs and is now working with an ILS with very limited Unicode support, I have a great appreciation for the benefits of Unicode.

Libraries should, in all that they do, attempt to store and present data in Unicode. This includes our catalogs, web sites, and other data repositories. Even if you offer very little outside of the standard Western characters, it makes your data that much more accessible and useful.