Solved Unicode characters and fonts, how to know what to add?

[ron.alan]

Earlier today I was on a website that had some Greek text. The Greek text showed up okay, but in one word, between two characters, I got that dreaded box with the 4 numbers in it (0313 if you want to know). My question is this: is there a way to find out what fonts readily available in Linux support this unicode character without having to install fonts one by one on a hit-or-miss basis?

 

[osprey]

A long-winded way of determining the unicode character is to open a file in vim, and do the following:
Press i (this goes to INSERT mode);
Press Ctrl+v (this goes to insert-special-keys mode);
Press u0313 (this enters the Unicode character CHECK MARK (U+0313)

Then the output into the file should show what the character is, in this case, a comma above the letters rather than on the line.

Or, you can ask a search engine what the unicode 0313 is, and it will tell you that it's named:
Combining Comma Above, and is the same comma as the above technique shows.

As for the unicode character sets, they are all available at: http://unicode.org/charts/, and all downloadable as pdfs.

 

[ron.alan]

Thanks, but nothing in that link tells me what fonts support this character, unless it's there and I'm just missing it.

 

[osprey]

Thanks, but nothing in that link tells me what fonts support this character, unless it's there and I'm just missing it.

The Greek font that supports this character will be a font that includes elements from the unicode charts as follows:

For for the high comma alone, it will be from the "Combining Diacritical Marks U0300.pdf".
For the standard Greek alphabet it will be from "Greek and Coptic U0370.pdf".
For the Greek diacritics such as a character combined with a letter, it will be from the "Greek Extended U1F00.pdf".

The font you appear to want needs to include those elements. Here's some links that may help:

New Athena Unicode Font Download

SBL Educational Resources

Unicode Polytonic Greek

Unicode polytonic Greek fonts and utilities.

www.russellcottrell.com

For general info on Greek diacritics see:

Greek diacritics - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

 

[f33dm3bits]

I always look them up in here, type the number(ie: 0313) in the search and press enter. Then click on the result that has "Unicode" in the name and finally click on "Fonts that support"

 

[ron.alan]

Thanks to osprey and f33dm3bits for your help. Installing fonts-sil-gentiumplus fixes it.

(I probably should have tried fonts-sil-gentiumplus-compact first, that would have saved me 9 MBs of space if it would have fixed the "problem." Oh well, these days 9 MBs ain't much.)