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Fonts That Support the Creative Commons Unicode Symbols
As of Unicode 13.0 (released in March 2020), the character set has included glyphs representing Creative Commons licenses.
- 1F16D - The Creative Commons logo (🅭)
- 1F10D - CC0, the public domain dedication (🄍)
- 1F16F - Attribution (🅯)
- 1F10E - Share-Alike ()
- 1F10F - Non-Commercial ()
The No-Derivatives symbol uses the preexisting 229C (⊜), Circled Equals.
Most people can probably already see the problem/question. After four years, I can't find any fonts that have the five glyphs at those code-points. Chances are, everybody sees the CC logo as a box containing "1F16D," for example, instead of CC in a circle.
While I understand (and share) the reluctance to add trademarks to the Unicode standard, I do use and refer to Creative Commons licenses enough that I would like to use the now-standard symbols when I refer to a work released under a CC BY-SA license. However, I can't find any fonts that do this.
Plenty of icon fonts exist, such as Font Awesome, but they use Private Use Areas for those glyphs rather than the standardized code-points, and that would also require changing fonts to insert them into a document, since they don't have alphabetic characters. And at that point, we might as well insert inline images into the text, since that doesn't require carrying around a massive font.
Therefore, getting to the actual question in the title, does anybody know of fonts (ideally OFL or similarly licensed) that cover these symbols in their proper locations? Related, do we not have these symbols everywhere in a quiet act of protest against Unicode's inclusion of the symbols, like the griping about certain newer emoji?
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You can use the command line tool albatross (https://gitlab.com/islandoftex/albatross/) to find out which of the fonts you already have on your system, contain a given symbol.
For example, on my system:
albatross 🅭 🄍 🅯 🄎 🄏
__ __ __
.---.-.| | |--.---.-.| |_.----.-----.-----.-----.
| _ || | _ | _ || _| _| _ |__ --|__ --|
|___._||__|_____|___._||____|__| |_____|_____|_____|
Unicode glyphs with code points [1F16D], [1F10D], [1F16F], [1F10E], [1F10F]
mapping to [🅭, 🄍, 🅯, 🄎, 🄏] (AND search)
┌─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│ Font name │
├─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┤
│ .LastResort │
│ Fira Code Bold │
│ Fira Code Medium │
│ Fira Code Regular │
│ Fira Code Retina │
│ Fira Code SemiBold │
└─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘
which shows that Fira Code font has the glyphs. Testing them in a document indeed shows the symbols:
You can get the font from https://github.com/tonsky/FiraCode (licensed under OFL-1.1 license).
The easiest way to install albatross is probably via a tex distribution like texlive or miktex. Alternatively, you could try to directly download the .jar file from CTAN (https://ctan.org/tex-archive/support/albatross/scripts).
You could use the site https://www.fileformat.info to find fonts which contain a specific character. For example for the creative commons logo:
https://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/1F16D/fontsupport.htm
the site will suggest these four fonts which contain the symbol:
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Therefore, getting to the actual question in the title, does anybody know of fonts (ideally OFL or similarly licensed) that cover these symbols in their proper locations?
There’s a font named CC Symbols by Daniel Aleksandersen that contains the glyphs for the six Creative Commons–specific characters at their proper locations. It also contains a glyph for U+0229C CIRCLED EQUALS in order to help make sure that all of the CC-related symbols look consistent together. The CC Symbols font only contains glyphs for those seven characters, so you’ll have to pair it with at least one other font.
The CC Symbols font is not available under the OFL or a similar license. Instead the author dedicated it to the public domain:
The symbols in the font a based on the Unicode Standard reference symbols. I waive all copyright to the font and release it into the 🅮 public domain.
Additionally, that blog post contains example CSS for how you could use the CC Symbols font on a Web site. That example CSS is CC0’d:
Unless otherwise stated, source code printed in this article is licensed under a CC0 1.0 License.
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