Hello guys,

this may not be the perfect forum to ask but does anyone know a font with perfect support primitive support that could be used with LaTeX/XeTeX?

For some unknown reason, my web browser (Firefox on Mac) displays a few primitives (not all) like ⺺, 丷 ,咅 ,⻏, ⺶ but when I try to compile a XeTeX document with popular fonts like IPAexMincho, EPSON*, GT20000-01, Mona, cinecaption, Code2000 or TakaoMincho, they won't work.

Thanks a lot if anyone has a clue!

I would guess very few of these are Japanese, for example 丷 isn't Japanese at all, but a Korean mark.

Primitives aren't Japanese, they were invented by Heisig and although there is a concept of radicals there's certainly no guarantee that they are part of any of the Japanese character set (JIS) standards.

If the LaTeX is going to be a source for a PDF then your best is to hardcode the fonts you know will work. If it's going to be the actual document then you are probably better off with images since they are a bit more portable, otherwise you should probably consider just having the final document as a PDF with the fonts embedded.

I couldn't find the unicode codepoints for all of the marks in your post, Windows/Chrome doesn't even render the first one, but it turns out that 咅 is actually a super rare kanji (表外字) in Japanese. You can find it stand-alone in kanji dictionaries.

Oh thanks! You're right, I shouldn't have looked for a 'Japanese' font. I looked for a universal font and GNU Unifont works wonders, although it's not vectorial.

http://www.transient.eclipse.co.uk/Pangolin_font.zip