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Fixedsys Excelsior

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Category
  
Almost monospace

Designer(s)
  
Darien Gavin Valentine

Classification
  
Sans-serif

Fixedsys Excelsior is an unofficial pan-Unicode extension of the popular Microsoft font Fixedsys. The current version, last updated in 2007, is 3.01.

Contents

In addition to the basic Latin alphabet supported by the original Fixedsys, this font supports Arabic alphabet, Cyrillic script, Runic alphabet, IPA, etc., but not CJK (a complete listing of coverage can be seen below). It also contains narrow, serif, reverse, italic, cursive, and reversed (mirror image) forms of Fixedsys stored in its Private Use Area. The font is fitted entirely into the Basic Multilingual Plane, and as such, some characters with Unicode support in other planes (such as the Gothic alphabet and Mathematical Alphanumeric Symbols) are instead mapped into the PUA for greater accessibility. The fullwidth character section is instead filled by small capitals and text figure forms of Fixedsys. Overall, 5,993 glyphs are covered in the typeface.

Fixedsys Excelsior is free software and appears to have been released by its author into the public domain. The font has no hinting.

History - Version 3.00

  • Arabic, Hebrew and Armenian is made from scratch.
  • Font height is changed to 16 pixels.
  • Improved Latin extensions and Cyrillic.
  • Added several more double-width characters and removed Japanese Kana signs
  • Underline error removed.

    • Adult content

    In the [private use area] of the widely distributed Fixedsys Excelsior 2.0 (last updated in 2004), the font contains characters contained in few other fonts, so it is likely to be selected by Windows for displaying those character codes. In Mozilla Firefox and some other programs, this appears to be the default.

    In that image range, there are images for genitalia (U+E1CE, U+E1CF); steaming excrement (U+E188 to U+E18A); and others. Because of this, some "child friendly" chat clients and Internet forums filter out these character codes, as well as the range EA00 to EAFF which allows bitmapped images to be created.

    The genitalia were removed in Fixedsys Excelsior 3, though the steaming excrements remained and a "Now More Moist!" sign was added (to complement a dingbat of a logo for a tinned food product named "Catbeef").

    Sparse and peculiar control character glyphs

    A handful of the C0 controls have glyphs consisting of a tiny "CC" over an inverse (swapped foreground and background) letter. Controls B (0x02, start-text), C (0x03, end-text), and O (0x0F, shift-out) have their correct letter; however controls V (0x16, sync), and _ (0x1F, unit-separator) are identified as R, and U—corresponding to their usage for "reverse" (inverse) and underlined text in many IRC clients.

    Codepoints 0x91 (private-use-1), and 0x92 (private-use-2) are glyphed as typographical single quotes—corresponding to Windows Codepage 1252.

    Controls I (0x09, tab), J (0x10, line-feed), and M (0x0D, carriage-return) The rest of the C0 controls are glyphed as solid rectangles

    Supported Unicode ranges

  • Part of Myanmar (1000–109F): 1040–1049
  • Georgian (10A0–10FF)
  • Ethiopic (1200–137F)
  • Ogham (1680–169F)
  • Runic (16A0–16FF)
  • Tai Le (1950–197F)
  • Part of Phonetic Extensions (1D00–1D7F): 1D00–1D2F, etc.
  • Latin extended additional (1E00–1EFF)
  • Greek Extended (1F00–1FFF)
  • General Punctuation (2000–206F)
  • Part of Superscripts and Subscripts (2070–209F): 2070–208F
  • Part of Currency Symbols (20A0–20CF): 20A0–20B6—Warning: Through U+20B1 to U+20B6, the glyphs are shifted next code point of the correct code point.
  • Part of Letterlike Symbols (2100–214F)
  • Part of Number Forms (2150–218F): Roman numerals (2160–2183)
  • Part of Arrows (2190–21FF)
  • Part of Mathematical Operators (2200–22FF)
  • Part of Miscellaneous Technical (2300–23FF)
  • Part of Control Pictures (2400–243F)
  • Part of Optical Character Recognition (2440–245F): 2440–244A
  • Part of Enclosed Alphanumerics (2460–24FF)
  • Box Drawing (2500–257F)
  • Part of Block Elements (2580–259F)
  • Part of Geometric Shapes (25A0–25FF)
  • Part of Miscellaneous Symbols (2600–26FF)
  • Part of Dingbats (2700–27BF)
  • Supplemental Arrows-A (27F0–27FF)
  • Part of Braille Patterns (2800–28FF): 2800–283F
  • Latin Extended-C (2C60–2C7F)
  • Georgian Supplement (2D00–2D2F)
  • Tifinagh (2D30–2D7F)
  • Part of CJK Symbols and Punctuation (3000-303F): 3002, 300C-300F, 3030
  • Yijing Hexagram Symbols (4DC0–4DFF)
  • Latin Extended-D (A720–A7FF)
  • In Private Use Area (E000–F8FF), there is Tengwar, Gothic, Miscellaneous characters, narrow, serif, italic, cursive, and reversed form of Fixedsys.
  • Part of Alphabetic Presentation Forms (FB00–FB4F)
  • Part of Arabic Presentation Forms-A (FB50–FDFF)
  • Part of Small Form Variants (FE50–FE6F)
  • Arabic Presentation Forms-B (FE70–FEFF)
  • Part of Halfwidth and Fullwidth Forms (FF00–FFEF): Fullwidth numbers (FF10–FF19) and Fullwidth capitals (FF21–FF3A)—drawn as the small capitals and text figures
  • Specials (FFF0–FFFF)

    • References

    Fixedsys Excelsior Wikipedia
    (Text) CC BY-SA