Subject: Unicode Font holes

From: "Douglas L. Schiffer" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 21 Jun 1995 08:50:00 EST

I looked at my UNIHAN24 font to see which codepoints were blank.
There were 1268 codepoints with no characters (I have one of the
earlier copies that leaves the cell blank rather than putting
a radical as a makeshift substitute.)

Next, I whipped up a dBase program to extract the Unicode Xreference
info for those characters that are missing. This let me see which
character sets stood the best chance to fill in the holes.

Here's a run-down:

GB:

        '1'   GB12345:       142
        '3'   GB7589-87      257
        '5'   GB7590-87      168
        '7'   'modern'        25
        '8'   GB8565-89       76

            The rest had no GB entry. As expected, none had a code
            of '0', as those would have been copied from a GB2312-80
            bitmap.  Slim pickin's, and nobody I've ever heard of
            has any of these font files.

BIG5:
        one character (U+5f5e = C255)  One got away!

CNS:
        '1'  plane 1           1     above Big 5 character
        'E'  plane 14        666     the characters of the beast! :-)

        If someone could find a CNS 11643-1986 font, plane 14, we'd
        have over 1/2 the holes filled!

JIS:
        '1'  JISX0212        497
        'I'  IBM Ext.          5

        JIS 0212 fonts *DO* exist.  Here's another possible source.

KSC:
        '1'  KSC 5657-1991    78

        Not worth the effort to track down one of these.

ANSI:
        all                   18

        Why bother!

CCCII:
        all                  594

        Here's another possible one.  CCCII fonts exist, and this
        has about half the needed characters.

The most likely sets:
----------------------
CCCII OR JIS0212 OR CNS     1002

If we could dredge up these 3 sets, and copy the needed characters
then we'd fill almost all the holes. The remaining ~260 could be
filled by hand.