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THIS IS SO COOL WTF I LOVE IT #1

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ckoshka opened this issue Nov 22, 2023 · 1 comment
Open

THIS IS SO COOL WTF I LOVE IT #1

ckoshka opened this issue Nov 22, 2023 · 1 comment

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@ckoshka
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ckoshka commented Nov 22, 2023

not an issue i just wanted to say it

@ckoshka ckoshka closed this as completed Nov 22, 2023
@stgiga
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stgiga commented Nov 24, 2023

Why thank you! This project was a labor of love, and I remember at one stage of it sacrificing academics for it (it almost screwed me over, but that's a very long story from years ago.) I still have the files for it, but the result being something one could build with the Unifont hex files was not really the case. I rethought much of what I was doing. Ultimately, on a better computer than in those days, FontForge will crash if you open more than one font file, and while it was bad back then, the problem got worse and became unfixable (or very close to). So no 32x16 Old Church Slavonic Chinese characters, no non-game "Alien Monster", etc. Oh and that prototype used older versions for their serif characters. Those were VERY annoying to integrate, and were one of the biggest thorns in my side. UnifontEX meanwhile only took an hour to update, that hour being spent largely removing the hex box placeholder glyphs. Plus the result can be built automatically and with far less input files (only 2 versions of Unifont, rather than, like, 10). Plus, who am I (a monolingual white [Armenian though] Westerner) to decide how non-ASCII text looks? In the words of Tom Scott, It is something that I am not qualified to talk about!. Nonetheless, I am glad you enjoy what I spent basically all of my HS and Community College years on. I originally started seriously heavily working on it when I needed to input VERY special physics characters in my Physics Honors course in my second year of HS. I have dysgraphia and am terrible at handwriting English, let alone ANYTHING else. I don't even have a full 96 ASCII characters I am able to handwrite. So in essence, I made my own form of accessibility tool because, Microsoft Word's math features didn't have the needed characters for Physics. Funnily enough, I'm FAR better at writing than math. I'm planning on using UnifontEX in my technical writing exclusively. No other font will be used. I also use it in my IDEs, text editors, and Terminals because it behaves like a monospace font and can display all sorts of fancy characters, including the esoteric Fraktur and Fraktur+Bold ANSI sequences. And of course emoji. Also, I tested it on a 2013 MacBook Air still running its original OS, and it was able to display virtually all the fancy Unicode on places like Archive Of Our Own, Tumblr, and Twitter/X/𝕏. That's its own story though. I also have Firefox/forks set to force ALL page fonts to it because compatibility. I even used about:config to make it forego the Mozilla Twemoji, Apple Color Emoji, or Segoe UI Emoji UNLESS the character DOESN'T exist in UnifontEX. Sadly, YouTube, Discord, Mastodon, and Twitter/X don't get the memo to not use their own Emoji fonts unless a character doesn't exist. Oh, also, Blink-engine browsers don't have nearly as much control over font rendering as Firefox/forks do. You can't for instance force something like Opera GX to force ALL fonts to this. I wish UnifontEX were integrated into stuff like Archive Of Our Own, Fanfiction.net, FurAffinity, SoFurry, Furry Network, DeviantArt, and basically any site that has literature sections. The WOFF1 version of UnifontEX is small at 3.7 megabytes (an average photograph and/or ad), so granting good Unicode support to a site wouldn't hurt anything. People could actually use Unicode in their stories and people would actually be able to see it without screwing around with their Firefox settings. Oh better yet, Android being the FOSS OS it is should allow using it as a font choice for if something isn't supported. I can read it just fine, and I have what one would consider dyslexia (it manifests in multiple ways, be it issues with tables/grids/graphs, eyes jumping up when reading books, or sometimes mis-seeing words. I exhibit the symptoms of it, but I haven't been tested for it. I don't know the science behind why I can read UnifontEX over OpenDyslexic.) I have my MoonReader+ environment full of Fanfiction set to make books render in it (PDFs don't), and I'm able to read it just as well as the official Fanfiction.net app, which I had to toy around with the behavior of MoonReader+ scrolling to emulate its scrolling. I tried various F-Droid e-book readers, but they didn't allow font stuff, so... Also I put UnifontEX on my Kindle (long story), and it works. I have a LOT of plans for UnifontEX, but they are somewhat down the road. If there's anything you should know about me, I'm cunning and ambitious. And tenacious. If I'm going to do something, I feel like I should go for it and do it to the best of my ability. That's the philosophy behind quite a few of my projects. BWTC32Key's compression level box took extra effort to implement, but I did so just in case someone actually needs it. My various SoundFonts could have just stopped at General MIDI, but in multiple cases I decided to just see how far I can make them go into compatibility with extensions to General MIDI. It's an ongoing effort as of the time of writing. I do all of this stuff as a hobby, and it has nothing to do with my career pathway. I get bored easily, so I do stuff like THIS. I'm always so satisfied when I'm done, and then it's something else, or I go back in later and make edits. I do all this because I can. I do things so that others don't have to. Oh and yes, I'm writing this while drained from Thanksgiving and admittedly somewhat off, so... Pleease forgive my rambling about stuff. I'm reopening this issue if anyone else wants to thank me for this!

@stgiga stgiga reopened this Nov 24, 2023
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