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I am obsessed with the Monaco font (from Mac terminal.app) and I want to have it on my gentoo setup. The problem is that I'm greek and Monaco does not want to work with unicode characters (greek letters and some special characters that I use).

Is there any way I can find the monaco font with all the unicode characters? Do I have to export them from Mac? If yes why hasn't anyone done so (I've search the whole net...)?

Thanks.

dzervas
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    There is no single font covering the entire Unicode range. It's really a lot of work designing all those glyphs that not many people are using anyway. The fonts instead cover the range that they were designed for (Latin languages, Farsi, maths, miscellaneous symbols, etc). – Marco Feb 03 '15 at 18:51
  • but on Mac greek characters and some special characters work (like the bolt and smile) – dzervas Feb 03 '15 at 19:27

2 Answers2

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Monaco font (according to the Font Book application on OSX) contains less than 2000 glyphs, and does not support Greek. Here are the specifics:

Monaco Regular
Monaco Regular

    PostScript name Monaco
    Full name   Monaco
    Family      Monaco
    Style       Regular
    Kind        TrueType
    Language    Afrikaans, Albanian, Azerbaijani, Basque,
                Belarusian, Bulgarian, Catalan, Cornish, Croatian,
                Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Esperanto, Estonian,
                Faroese, Finnish, French, Galician, German,
                Hawaiian, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Irish,
                Italian, Kalaallisut, Kazakh, Latvian, Lithuanian,
                Macedonian, Malay, Maltese, Manx, Norwegian Bokmål,
                Norwegian Nynorsk, Oromo, Polish, Portuguese,
                Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian,
                Somali, Spanish, Swahili, Swedish, Swiss German,
                Turkish, Ukrainian, Uzbek, Vietnamese, Welsh, Zulu
    Script      Cyrillic, Latin
    Version     7.0d1e1
    Location    /System/Library/Fonts/Monaco.dfont
    Unique name Monaco; 7.0d1e1; 2013-04-24
    Copyright   © 1990-2008 Apple Inc.
                © 1990-97 Type Solutions Inc.
                © 1990-97 The Font Bureau Inc.
                TrueType outline design of Monaco typeface created
                by Kris Holmes and Charles Bigelow.
    Enabled     Yes
    Duplicate   No
    Copy protected No
    Glyph count 1,678

Given the copyrights, while you may find something else that covers Greek with a similar appearance, it won't be Monaco (it's not legal to distribute a modified font using the same name). The existing font covers only the Latin and Cyrillic alphabets. In Unicode (UTF-8) Greek and Cyrillic have different values, though they have some similar appearance.

Further reading:

  • 20. Greek and Cyrillic alphabets

    The basic Cyrillic alphabet is similar to the Greek.

  • The encoding of the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts

    1. Following on from point #4, any universal character encoding must distinguish Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic as scripts. If it does not do so, it would have insurmountable interoperability problems dealing with any of the huge amount of legacy data which already distinguished the scripts. Note that multiscript (partially) universal character encodings predating the Unicode Standard all did this. That includes IBM's registry of glyph identifiers, DEC's and Hewlett-Packard's listings of characters and glyphs, Xerox's XCCS character standard, WordPerfect's proprietary character sets, and Microsoft's and Apple's internal system of character identifications. The library community maintains the same script distinctions in its own data formats: MARC 21 (published by the Library of Congress) and UNIMARC (published by IFLA). Even the East Asian character encodings, as they developed, also distinguished Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic. See, for instance, JIS X 0208 itself, which separately encodes Greek and Cyrillic alphabets from ASCII Latin.

  • Greek and Coptic (Range: 0370–03FF) Unicode charts

  • Cyrillic (Range: 0400–04FF) Unicode charts
  • Monaco font licensing

In principle, you should be able to make a modified font for your personal use by copying glyphs from the Cyrillic codepoints to the (similar) Greek ones.

Thomas Dickey
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AFAIK, Monaco doesn't have very good glyph coverage. You're probably seeing the fallback font on your mac. I set Monaco's fallback font as Dejavu Sans Mono on linux, It looks fine for most symbols. Menlo works too.

jck
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