panglyph

The Fontist universal Unicode 17 font.

What it is

panglyph is a single redistributable font file covering every assigned Unicode 17.0 codepoint (~299,382 glyphs). It is the materialized form of ucode’s universal glyph set: where ucode produces one SVG per codepoint (sourced from Tier 1 fonts via fontisan), panglyph assembles those outlines into one OpenType/TrueType font that any application can install and use as a Unicode 17 fallback.

Think "Noto Sans for everything" — except:

• Sourced from many Tier 1 fonts (Noto family + FSung for CJK, Lentariso for Sidetic, Kedebideri for Beria Erfe, NotoSerifTaiYo, UniHieroglyphica, Egyptian Text, Symbola, BabelStone, etc.)

• One font file, multiple script sources

• Built reproducibly from ucode’s per-block coverage matrix

• Open License (OFL for the assembled font, matching source licenses)

Why it exists

No single font today covers Unicode 17. Noto Sans comes closest but misses rare UC17 additions (Sidetic, Beria Erfe, Tolong Siki, Tai Yo), Egyptian Hieroglyphs Extended-B (needs UniHieroglyphica v16), CJK Extension J (needs FSung), and Symbols for Legacy Computing Supplement (needs BabelStone).

Users who want "Unicode 17 everywhere" must install 10+ fonts. panglyph collapses that to one.

Use cases

1. Browser fallback. Configure panglyph as the last-resort font. Any codepoint not covered by the active font gets panglyph’s outline instead of tofu.

2. OS-level Unicode 17 coverage. Install once, every app gets full Unicode 17 rendering.

3. Print/PDF embedding. Embed a single font for any Unicode 17 text.

4. Fontist.org specimen rendering. When fontist.org shows a char that the active font misses, fall back to panglyph instead of tofu.

Repository status

Bootstrap. Build pipeline (outline extraction via fontisan + assembly) lands in TODO 03 of fontist/ucode/TODO.full/.

License

The assembled panglyph font is OFL. Every source font in ucode’s universal glyph set must be OFL (or compatible: Apache, MIT, BSD, CC0, UFL, Bitstream, GUST, CC-BY). Specialist fonts with proprietary licenses cannot be included; their codepoints fall back to pillar 2 or pillar 3 of the universal glyph set.

See also

• fontist/ucode — Unicode data + universal glyph set (input)

• fontist/fontisan — font parsing + WOFF conversion (parser)

• TODO.full/01-panglyph-vision.md in the ucode repo — full vision doc