[Fontconfig] About gucharmap

[Behdad Esfahbod]

Hi,

I was browsing the list archives of recent discussions, where I
hit a message [1] about how gucharmap cannot be used to check
whether a font has a glyph for a specific character.

Since that's definitely the easiest way to check for glyph
availability, I'm going to reveal this little trick:  Run
gucharmap, select the font you want, and for each glyph in the
table view, if you right click on it, a zoomed image shows up and
below it you can see which font the glyph was selected from.
If it's anything other than the font you've chosen, that doesn't
cover this character.

There is an option in Pango to turn off font fallbacks, which not
incidentally, the original author of gucharmap implemented.
There's no UI for using that in gucharmap yet though.

[1] http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/fontconfig/2006-February/002076.html

Regards,

--behdad
http://behdad.org/

"Commandment Three says Do Not Kill, Amendment Two says Blood Will Spill"
	-- Dan Bern, "New American Language"