Symbols desired

[h-h-h-h]

Hello,

a came across some useful symbols that Source Code Pro doesn't define, yet. Are you willing to define them?

• U+1F5D1 WASTEBASKET (🗑)
• U+270D WRITING HAND (✍)
• U+270E LOWER RIGHT PENCIL (✎)
• U+270F PENCIL (✏)
• U+2710 UPPER RIGHT PENCIL (✐)

Isn't there a stand-alone pencil with a rotation of WRITING HAND?

Thanks!

[pauldhunt]

is there any particular reason you feel that Source Code would benefit from including these symbols?

[h-h-h-h]

I needed them for GUI design with box drawing symbols and other characters. WASTEBASKET can have the meaning of "delete" and a pen the meaning of "edit". Maybe it's a valuable information for you what was already looked for, 'cause often times surely users just switch to another font. But I think Source Code Pro already is a pretty-looking typeface with box drawing symbols, arrow heads and more. Adding the symbols would be valuable for the described and other purposes.

[h-h-h-h]

There are some other useful symbols in this context:

• U+1F4BE FLOPPY DISK (💾) can have the meaning of "save"
• U+1F5AB WHITE HARD SHELL FLOPPY DISK (🖫) can have the meaning of "save"

Further, the symbols in the range from U+239B to U+23AD are a good extension to the box drawing symbols. They draw parentheses and brackets spanning multiple lines:

⎛
⎜
⎝
Parentheses
⎞
⎟
⎠

⎡
⎢
⎣
Square brackets
⎤
⎥
⎦

⎧
⎪
⎨
⎪
⎩
Curly brackets
⎫
⎪
⎬
⎪
⎭

This is useful for explanations and the like.

[floam]

This is useful for explanations and the like.

Better example, in mathematics. And this is stuff people use in terminals today - SymPy for example. Here's output in an isympy session:

In [8]: ((x-1)/(x**2 + 3)/(x+5), x)
Out[8]: 
⎛     x - 1         ⎞
⎜────────────────, x⎟
⎜        ⎛ 2    ⎞   ⎟
⎝(x + 5)⋅⎝x  + 3⎠   ⎠

In [9]: Integral(sqrt(1/x), x)
Out[9]: 
⌠           
⎮     ___   
⎮    ╱ 1    
⎮   ╱  ─  dx
⎮ ╲╱   x    
⌡           

Rendered with Menlo in Terminal.app:

It looks messed up (overlapping on the bottom of the parens, and separately the font weight/alignment on square root) with SCP selected as missing glyphs are being poorly substituted by the OS from other fonts:

[h-h-h-h]

@h-h-h-h:
Isn't there a stand-alone pencil with a rotation of WRITING HAND?

Please note that while most fonts I inspected use a horizontal pencil for U+270F, the font Segoe UI Emoji uses a pencil with a rotation a right hand writing. That's the most useful and most needed symbol of those pencil symbols in my opinion!

[polarathene]

After dealing with font configuration on Linux, and finding that a font was overriding the glyphs of other fonts from having a higher priority when seeking fallbacks, I'd like to vote against something like this(since others seem to be for it).

Your OS (Windows/macOS I'm pretty sure handle this, Linux definitely) should be falling back to alternative fonts when glyphs are missing. Emoji/Symbols are a common enough case for this to deserve their own separate fonts, this is what the Noto fonts from Google(derived from Adobe iirc) have done.

That way, you're free to mix/match whatever fallback font you like(assuming your OS or editor has support for influencing the fallback selection, Linux does, and on macOS terminals like iTerm2 have a symbol font in settings). If you were to merge in requests here, then the next set of issues is arguments for style/design bias, black/white or colour versions, etc.

[h-h-h-h]

@polarathene: Fallback fonts mess up character sizes, at least on Windows. Not to do this is especially important with Source Code Pro, since it's a monospace font.

[polarathene]

I don't know what sort of control you'd have with fallback fonts on Windows. On Linux you can make a font scalable, so symbol/emoji adjust appropriately.

If this were to be supported, it should be some variant, as disabling glyphs is more difficult to do/maintain as a user than fallback fonts imo. If you can find a way to ensure what fallback font is used, perhaps Noto Emoji would work, or if you're ok with colour, Noto Color Emoji. It's considered monospace.