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So I was looking at this answer on stackoverflow and realized that my fonts aren't covering a whole lot of the utf-8 unicode spectrum (as I get lots of squares). Does anyone know a font that will cover all of that post?

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    not an answer to exactly your Q, but I noted a utility to conveniently list the fonts (installed) that support the orthogrphy of a given language, eg fc-list :lang=kv family, and then one can query for the corresponding files, pkgs, URLs, so that one can help others needing the fonts.
    – imz -- Ivan Zakharyaschev
    May 30, 2011 at 0:59

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The hands-down most comprehensive coverage would be Roman Czyborra's GNU Unicode Font project. It is intended to collect a complete and free 8×16/16×16 pixel Unicode font. It currently covers 34,445 characters (out of ~40,000+ defined characters).

Most distributions have GNU Unifont in their repositories.

Ed Trager has written a Unicode Font Guide For Free/Libre Open Source Operating Systems which collates geographic coverage of fonts and their associated licensing. The guide was last updated in 2008.

Other fonts with good Unicode support include:

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    Unicode 10 contains 136690 characters.
    – Martin Thoma
    Aug 5, 2017 at 13:12
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I came across this in 2016.

A single TTF/OTF font is never going to cover all utf-8 characters. There is a hard limit of 65535 glyphs in a font, and over 1 million utf-8 glphys. You will need to use a font-family for this to work.

A good font-family is the noto font family: https://www.google.com/get/noto/

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    The main issue is browsers can use only one font - as far as I know - for displaying e.g. websites. But the reality is a bit worse - a lot of glyphs missing from most popular fonts. So at least if the 64k glyph is stuffed, it would be better than the current state.
    – Gabor Garami
    Aug 21, 2016 at 11:30
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    @GaborGarami Agreed, but some font mechanisms (like fontconfig) will try to grab glyphs from alternative fonts, even if different from the main font.
    – rbrito
    Aug 24, 2016 at 15:56
  • @rbrito ohh, i didn't know that. Thanks for the info.
    – Gabor Garami
    Aug 25, 2016 at 11:51
  • Most browsers will fallback for individual glyphs too.
    – jbg
    Feb 23, 2017 at 13:20
  • there's no UTF-8 character because UTF-8 is just an encoding for Unicode. And there are only 0x10FFFF Unicode code points, any UTF-8 sequence that encodes a code point larger than U+10FFFF is invalid. Even UTF-32 is also limited to 0x10FFFF. See Why Unicode is restricted to 0x10FFFF?
    – phuclv
    Apr 19, 2019 at 16:41

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