Reference rendering on Unicode.org doesn't work

[jsbien]

It does not work:

I am very curious where the Unicode script used here is documented!

[Boldewyn]

Unfortunately, I don’t know. This is an internal Unicode tool. I just noticed that the refglyph script was used, when other Unicode tools show images of code points, therefore I thought it to be a good idea to deep-link to it from codepoint pages.

It seems that the tool is not complete, though. This one, for example, works fine: https://www.unicode.org/cgi-bin/refglyph?24-FF93

But using U+A775 generates an “Invalid data” error message, that is then returned as plain text (and thus not a valid GIF image, hence the browser message).

I noticed gaps in the tool’s support already in the past. It might be better to remove the link to it altogether then.

[jsbien]

It's a pity the tool is not officially released, it would be quite useful. What about asking the Consortium about it? Of course the answer can be you are not allowed to use it :-(

[Boldewyn]

I’m quite sure that that would be the answer. As far as I can tell the tool renders the examples from the initial proposals, but Unicode doesn’t get tired to point out, that the copyright for those examples lies with the respective font providers.

One alternative would be to refer to the lo-fi renderings provided by GNU Unifont: https://unifoundry.com/unifont/ Unifont is usually quite fast including new Unicode versions, and they always provide two BMP images with all glyphs in the first two planes. Every code point is a 16x16 pixel image with a fixed and calculable position in the image.

[jsbien]

Copyright is quite a mess :-(