Symbella Font List

[DanielH]

I have compiled a list of fonts for viewing the Effulgence Symbellas, preferably of free-to-use fonts. These can then be embedded into the ebooks created by the program in the recent announcements, put into a CSS script for including the fonts, etc; I plan to create the CSS file sometime soon. Etty is now my least-favorite Bell (she probably already was, given my pre-existing bias against her canon, but additionally U+0C12 TELUGU LETTER O is incredibly hard to find).

So far, the list works with all threaded and most unthreaded bells, but fails for East, Sierra, and Raven. The current list is:

• Symbola, public domain*
• GNU FreeSans, GPL with exception allowing embedding
• Lohit Telugu, Open Font License
• Droid Sans Fallback Full, Apache License v2

As stated above, this list doesn’t cover all of the Bells which haven’t yet been threaded. Also, Droid Sans Fallback is only used for one symbella (Phoenix), so it may be possible to change one of the earlier fonts to one that includes that too.

I hope to have the CSS file up within 24 hours or so, if nobody does before now.

* IANAL, but I’m pretty sure it’s technically copyright in the US. The author’s intent was clearly to place it in the public domain, though.

[Kappa]

The DejaVu family might fill some of the holes, but it might not.

[DanielH]

I’m pretty sure it doesn’t fill in any holes not filled in be GNU FreeSans, but it might be a good idea to include it for the standard text (which, if you aren’t careful when implementing this list, would be filled in by Symbola instead. I don’t know much about font design, but using a symbol font instead of DejaVu seems like a bad option). I checked specifically because you recommended it, but DejaVu isn’t intended to be a pan-Unicode font in the same way FreeSans is.

[Kappa]

I think (DejaVu + Symbola) might actually have been the base set I started with, plus maybe some other font that I don't think I recognize from that list.

Every symbella that has been decided on for Effulgence displays fine for me in DrRacket using DejaVu Sans Mono, in the program I use to generate Effulgence index list items. Now, maybe this computer has more fonts installed that I don't know about, I don't actually know how to check, it's a borrowed computer. And maybe DrRacket is smart enough to fall back to them when DejaVu fails. But I feel like it would probably end up breaking monospacing if it did that unless it was exceptionally clever, and monospacing isn't broken in that file that I can tell.

[DanielH]

I know DejaVu Sans Mono doesn’t have all the symbellas. I’m not surprised DrRacket is smart enough to fall back on something else; that’s fairly common. I am surprised it’s smart enough not to break monospacing; I have literally *never* seen that before, and I would expect DrRacket to use some standard code display component. That is impressive.

What OS is the computer running? I’d like to figure out what the code display component is and whether it really is that smart or if DrRacket has added logic on top of that.

[Marri]

Not sure how helpful this is, but on my Macbook Air I can see all the symbellas for all Bells in Roll Call except Stormy and Nika, without installing any new fonts.

[Kappa]

It works equally well on my home computer (Windows 7) and this computer (Ubuntu). I'm pretty sure DrRacket is just that good.