Code Point Coverage

These are tools for determining which Unicode code points are "available" in a given environment. "Available" means that there is some font available that provides a glyph for that code point, or in the case of non-printing characters that the character is not considered "missing".

This is mostly interesting for mobile OSes where it is either impossible or very cumbersome to add fonts.

Methodology

Coverage is determined by inspecting the font files that are bundled with the OS. If there is at least one font providing a glyph (more specifically, with an entry in the cmap table) for a given codepoint, that codepoint is considered "covered".

For iOS, the fonts are taken from the iOS Simulator runtimes bundled with various versions of Xcode. For Android, the fonts are taken from the Android Emulator system images downloadable with the Android SDK.

Data

Raw glyph lists are available in data.

These are the kinds of data that can be generated:

% make help
usage: make [target]
Available targets:
regex Generate regex for latest iOS and Android versions
decimal Generate glyphs forall platformsin decimal format
dart Generate Dart regex for all platforms
clean Clean temporary files
avd-fonts Dump fonts from a running Android Virtual Device
help Show this help text

Querying

The cpc script allows you to query the data.

% ./cpc
Usage: cpc COMMAND [ARGS...]
Commands:
diff PLATFORM1 PLATFORM2
List glyphs available in just one of the specified platforms, in
U+xxxxxx format
diffText PLATFORM1 PLATFORM2
List glyphs available in just one of the specified platforms, as
plain text
available TEXT
List the platforms on which all codepoints in the specified text are
available

Other Applications

Is It Tofu? is a web app based on this data that analyzes a block of text and shows compatibility information for iOS and Android.

License

MIT