Tuesday, February 19, 2013

Coptic Unicode Fonts

A Unicode Font for writing Coptic should at least have the code pages for Coptic (stating at U2C80) and Coptic in the Greek code page (stating at 03E2). In addition, general punctuation marks and some combining diacritical marks like Jinkim are needed. The following pdf-Table lists a minimum set of code points that are needed for writing Coptic Unicode. This is mainly based on the suggestion made by http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~pinax/coptic.html.
Another list can be found at http://www.wazu.jp/gallery/Test_Coptic.html.

I was able to find few Unicode Fonts on the web that (almost) cover these Code points:

• Antinoou: A standard font for Coptic (formerly called Keft) Antinoou italic
• Ifao N Copte
• GNU FreeSerif
• TITUS Cyberbit Font
• New Athena Unicode
• MPH2B Damase
• Arial Coptic (right click to download)
• Quivira.ttf
• Analecta (most combining diacritical marks are missing)
• 
  

If you happen to know about more fonts, then please report them to me.

All non-Unicode Coptic fonts that are available define their own character encoding in the ASCII range. The Coptic.Net site had tried to define a standard encoding for Coptic fonts, which they called Coptic Standard (CS). They have already mapped 8 most common fonts into this standard (and renamed them CSxxx). I have re-encoded these again into Unicode and merged each of them separately into the FreeSerif TrueType font. I make them here available for download, if someone is interested. Please notice that I am not an expert in font creation and I am not sure, if they also would work for you, the combining with the Jinkim and the bar still have to be refined, so try them with no warranty :


If you have any font which is not Unicode encoded, you can re-encode it yourself using the wonderful font tool: fontforge. If you use fontforge under Linux, it would be easier to patch iconv first as described here.

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Moheb Mekhaiel