Recently I saw a Darwinfish decal on the back of a car. This was new to me (I lead a sheltered life) and I included the image in a note to a friend.
I had looked quickly in the character map without luck, but found an image easily enough on line.

However this left me wondering: does the character map include all the Unicode symbols? For instance, I tried Control-Shift-U269C and it gave me a fleur-de-lis, which I do not see in the character map.

If new ones are created, do they arrive with the updates? If not, if one encounters a new one, can it be added to the existing map?

Do all Linux distributions use the same map? I am using Linux Mint.

Every font has its own selection of characters. In the word processor, using the Insert-Special character item in the menu will show just the characters in the selected font. In the character map program from the main menu, you can see all the characters available in your selection of fonts. The fleur-de-lis is in the miscellaneous symbols section and on my computer it's in DejaVu Sans Mono.

Fonts will be updated now and then, but a distro may not rush to give you the latest one: not many people will be anxious to get their hands on a fleur-de-lis or a black flag.

You can learn about what's available and where things are at
http://www.unicode.org/

If you want to add your own characters to a font, get the Fontforge editor.

2 members found this post helpful.

with a little luck, a unicode character exists for your darwinian fish.

draw it and find out!


edit: i like it. but due to its complexity, i doubt there'll be a unicode character for it.

edit2:
font management looks in all fonts available on the system until it finds the character requested.
that's why your char displays although it is not contained in the current system font.

edit3:
this is beyond including the character in an email, but if a unicode character does not exist, youmight want to look at various symbol fonts (old windows' *dings, or fontawesome and the like for modern webdesign)

1 members found this post helpful.

Complexity does not seem to be an obstacle, if you look at the Dingbats Fonts on 1001freefonts. I have not been able to localize a Darwin-fish, though.

There is a Darwin Font available on Linotype.com and MyFonts but it is commercial. If someone has this font, she/he could take a look on the symbols in the “Private Use Area” (U+E000) and those for special characters. But I doubt that there will be any interesting symbols at all.

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You could check here, lots and lots of fonts: DaFont

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OK, thanks.
It is reassuring to be reminded what a fractal world it is—I will never have an excuse to be bored, and I will never lack an excuse to put off real work!

1 members found this post helpful.

ondoho, thanks for the intro to Shapecatcher.com -- very cool tool. Unfortunately it's only able to come up with the single Unicode character that most closely matches your drawing, not a sequence of characters to match more complex drawings. Per twitter.com/BabelStone/status/657037513186373632, in October 2015, the Unicode Consortium considered adding Ichthys and Darwin Fish characters along with the Stupa and Pagoda symbols, but deferred the former two for now (no word yet on a Flying Spaghetti Monster symbol 👾).

Brant, I wanted to use a Darwin Fish in a YouTube comment, so after coming across this thread and verifying that there's wasn't a Unicode Darwin Fish character yet, I messed around with Shapecatcher and a couple of Unicode typing utilities, and the best I came up with was:

ӽd̲̅a̲̅r̲̅w̲̅i̲̅ɳ̲̅ᕗ

No doubt one could get a closer likeness using multiple aligned lines of text, but that's all on one line. The tail and back foot is a "Cyrillic small letter ha with hook" (0x4fd), the "darwi" is standard Latin characters with a "Combining overline" (0x305) and a "Combining low line" (0x332) on each character, the "n" and front foot are a "Latin small letter n with retroflex hook" (0x273) plus the same combining characters, and the head is a "Canadian syllabics fo" (0x1557).

I know the "DARWIN" should ideally be in all-caps, but normal capitals looked terrible with the overlines, and small caps had issues as well. Also I know there's not normally an eye on the fish, but none of the "eyeless head" characters I tried looked as good there, and the eye helps sell it as a fish, since the classic fish profile curvature isn't possible.

Unfortunately how it looks varies a lot by the font(s) used to render it (the edit box I'm typing in is a worst-case scenario, with the combining characters shown serially rather than combined, unless I go to WYSIWYG mode), but it looked OK in all the desktop and mobile OSes I checked it out in. In some fonts it looks better with a capital ha rather than a small one for the tail:

Ӽd̲̅a̲̅r̲̅w̲̅i̲̅ɳ̲̅ᕗ

Here's "evolution", for good measure, with small and large tails:

ӽe̲̅v̲̅o̲̅l̲̅u̲̅t̲̅i̲̅o̲̅ɳ̲̅ᕗ

Ӽe̲̅v̲̅o̲̅l̲̅u̲̅t̲̅i̲̅o̲̅ɳ̲̅ᕗ

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Dan Harkless
http://harkless.org/dan/

Hi Dan Harkless and welcome to LQ.

There are two reasons why the first post didn't work (1) you have resurrected a thread which is nearly a year old. While not too old, it was marked as Solved and thus the OP didn't feel they required any additional feedback. Therefore please think twice prior to responding to threads which are older than 6 months, especially if they are in a Solved state. The LQ page also asks if you are sure you wish to do this. (2) This was your first post, not in the Introductions forum, but in a technical forum and therefore it was marked for moderation. While this won't be an issue in the future, if there are other times where moderator assistance is needed, you might wish to wait as much as 24 hours to allow a moderator to have the time to look at the pending post.

No harm done, and once again, welcome!

It was answered, but it was not solved. The OP was told there was no way to create a Darwin Fish with Unicode characters. I gave information about the proposal for the Darwin Fish to be included into the Unicode standard, and gave a method with combining characters (e.g. ӽd̲̅a̲̅r̲̅w̲̅i̲̅ɳ̲̅ᕗ) to create one. I don't see how that's not relevant, or how the question being asked last year means no one will ever care about the answer again. And as I said, my post was no longer pending. It got approved and was appearing in the thread, and then while I was making a couple of edits to it, it was apparently deleted. I would respectfully ask that you approve my second attempt at the post, since it would be ridiculous to start a new thread for such a niche topic.

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Dan Harkless
http://harkless.org/dan/

Thank you to whoever restored my apparently moderator-deleted original reply to this thread. Cheers.

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Dan Harkless
http://harkless.org/dan/

That does look very cool!

1 members found this post helpful.

Thanks, Brant. Glad you liked the results of my little research project (I had been wanting to learn more about Unicode combining characters for awhile, and this was a perfect excuse). BTW, your "and I will never lack an excuse to put off real work!" cracked me up. 😅

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Dan Harkless
http://harkless.org/dan/

You've been reported; may want to let others know that the homepage on your profile *WILL NOT* get seen by any search engines, so your spam posts won't do anyone any good. Even though you tried to hide it in THIS post