New UTF fonts for Plan 9

Note: the 10646 fonts found here have been superseded by the fixed/ fonts in the default Plan 9 distribution. For all intents and purposes you can use the ones already available on your system.

The fonts found here include more and better looking UTF-8 glyphs. They come from the XFree86 distribution, and were created by Markus Kuhn [http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ucs-fonts.html]. Please read his very informative Unicode FAQ for Linux and UNIX (though Plan 9 users don't need to care about it much :)

The following is quoted from the README that came with these fonts.

None of these fonts covers Unicode completely. Complete coverage
simply would not make much sense here. Unicode 3.0 contains over 49000
characters, and the large majority of them are Chinese/Japanese/Korean
Han ideographs (~28000) and Korean Hangul Syllables (~11000) that
cannot adequately be displayed in the small pixel sizes of the fixed
fonts. Similarly, Arabic characters are difficult to fit nicely
together with European characters into the fixed character cells and
X11 lacks the ligature substitution mechanisms required for using
Indic scripts.

Therefore these fonts primarily attempt to cover Unicode subsets that
fit together with European scripts. This includes the Latin, Greek,
Cyrillic, Armenian, Georgian, and Hebrew scripts, plus a lot of
linguistic, technical and mathematical symbols. Some of the fixed
fonts now also cover Arabic, Thai, Ethiopian, halfwidth Katakana,
and some other non-European scripts.

The conversion was performed using Skip Tavakkolian's bdf2subf font converter.

New: Bugfixes, all fonts updated. See message in 9fans.

New: Download the complete font package (uncompress in /lib/font/bit): here.

Notes:

License: The fonts are copyright Markus Kuhn (see the COPYRIGHT section of the respective BDF files). They are freely distributed, provided his name is mentioned in the documentation and his Copyright is kept intact (keeping the bdf fonts in the distribution will do it).
The first 32 characters (0x00-0x1F) are not original. They have been modified from the latin1 and ascii fonts that already existed in Plan 9. This was done to keep consistency with the expected visual output Plan 9 users are accustomed to. Depending on the font, there are two options:
- Substitute the control characters in the 0x2400-0x2426 range if they exist (thereby losing the NUL character).
- Use the characters from one of the already existing Plan 9 fonts, if they exist for the font's size
The fonts that do not have a corresponding Plan 9 font of the same size are listed at the bottom of this page under "incomplete fonts". "Incomplete" here means that they do not have a reasonable amount of glyphs defined, not that more work needs to be done with the conversion. They correspond to TARGET1-complete fonts. Targets are explained below.
The fonts come with the bdf file included, so you can download bdf2subf and reencode them if you like.
You can find even more fonts here. Send me your encoded fonts and I'll include them on this web page.

utf8demo.txt -- This file could be used to test your UTF-8 fonts (warning: it crashes drawterm sometimes when used with the standard Plan 9 fonts). Download it and cat it in a rio session started with any of the fonts found here.
quickbrown.txt -- another test file

Instructions

Download any of these fonts below, uncompress them anywhere on your system and set font=/path/to/9x18.font in $home/lib/profile (or 10x20.font, or whatever :). Restart rio.

The following fonts correspond to 10646 in Linux
(put them in `/lib/font/bit/10646`)

6x13

6x13.tgz -- a 6x13 font. this one looks to be a good for small resolutions...
here's how it looks like:

7x13

7x13.tgz -- a 7x13 font. this one looks to be a good for small resolutions too...
here's how it looks like:

8x13

8x13.tgz -- a 8x13 font. reasonably complete
here's how it looks like:

9x15

9x15.tgz -- a 9x15 font, reasonably complete.
here's how it looks like:

9x18

9x18.tgz -- a 9x18 font, reasonably complete.
here's how it looks like:

10x20

10x20.tgz -- a 10x20 font, with even more glyphs.
here's how it looks like:

Japanese 12x13ja font

12x13ja.tgz -- font containing full-width asian characters. It should be possible to combine it with others (6x13 is the half-width font of choice) for a better mix. See 18x18ja too.

From the README for the original fonts:

  TARGET1    616 characters
             Covers all characters of ISO 8859 part 1-5,7-10,13-16,
             CEN MES-1, ISO 6937, Microsoft CP1251/CP1252, DEC VT100
             graphics symbols, and the replacement and default
             character. It is intended for small bold, italic, and
             proportional fonts, for which adding block graphics
             characters would make little sense. This repertoire
             covers the following ISO 10646-1:2000 collections
             completely: 1-3, 8, 12.

  TARGET2    885 characters
             Adds to TARGET1 the characters of the Adobe/Microsoft
             Windows Glyph List 4 (WGL4), plus a selected set of
             mathematical characters (covering most of ISO 31-11
             high-school level math symbols) and some combining
             characters. It is intended to be covered by all normal
             "fixed" fonts and covers all European IBM, Microsoft, and
             Macintosh character sets. This repertoire covers the
             following ISO 10646-1:2000 (including Amd 1:2002)
             collections completely: 1-3, 8, 12, 33, 45.

   12x13ja.bdf:

     Covers TARGET2, JIS X 0208, Hangul, and a few more. This font is
     primarily intended to provide Japanese full-width Hiragana,
     Katakana, and Kanji for applications that take the remaining
     ("halfwidth") characters from 6x13.bdf. The Greek lowercase
     characters in it are still a bit ugly and will need some work.

Japanese 18x18ja font

18x18ja.tgz -- font containing full-width asian characters. it should be possible to combine it with others (9x18 is the half-width font of choice) for a better mix. Experiment with the font file... [see 9x18ja for a sample font file]

From the README for the original fonts:

  18x18ja.bdf:
     Covers all JIS X 0208, JIS X 0212, GB 2312-80, KS X 1001:1992,
     ISO 8859-1,2,3,4,5,7,9,10,15, CP437, CP850 and CP1252 characters,
     plus a few more, where priority was given to Japanese han style
     variants. This font should have everything needed to cover the
     full ISO-2022-JP-2 (RFC 1554) repertoire. This font is primarily
     intended to provide Japanese full-width Hiragana, Katakana, and
     Kanji for applications that take the remaining ("halfwidth")
     characters from 9x18.bdf.

here's how it looks like:

9x18ja

9x18ja.font -- a sample font file combining japanese wide characters from 18x18ja with 9x18 chars. Warning the download is large. Requires that you install both 9x18.tgz and 18x18ja.tgz as subdirectories in the same directory, then put 9x18ja.font in the 9x18 directory.
here's how it looks like:

18x18ko

18x18ko.tgz -- a 18x18ko font, with even more glyphs.

18x18ko.bdf: 
     Covers the same repertoire as 18x18ja plus full coverage of all
     Hangul syllables and priority was given to Hanja glyphs in the
     unified CJK area as they are used for writing Korean.

unicode.8

Just for good measure, here's how an original Plan 9 font looks like (yes, I know stuff like @Zh crept in, but you get the picture):

Incomplete fonts

The following fonts do not contain that many glyphs, but are usable if you're not that much into foreign languages (i.e. they have a basic set that covers most widely used slphabets and special characters):