Quivira 4.1

Quivira 4.1 contains 11,053 characters.

• Download .otf-file
• Testpage for printing (PDF)
• Overview of characters (PDF)
• Combining characters (PDF)
• List of Private Use characters (PDF)

What is Quivira?

Quivira is a Unicode-based OpenType font containing much more characters than most of the well-known fonts. It is free to use.

Latest version

The current version 4.1 contains 391 new characters.

Objective

Quivira shall provide a large character repertoire, so that texts containing rather unusual characters can be rendered pleasingly.

Quivira is a free Unicode font in the OpenType format which is supported by every usual office program or printer. Unicode font means, it contains more than the standard characters for some western European languages.

From a typographic point of view, Quivira is a proportional serif font like e.g. the more well-known Times New Roman and Garamond. Thus it is suitable for writing well readable texts.

Do you prefer sans-serif? Check out my new font Catrinity!

Quivira is a very old hobby project and was started during my studies in 2003. It was in active development for quite some time, but in the recent years I have not found the time nor the inspiration for developing it further.

Therefore, to not block further advancement, Quivira is from now on (2019) in the Public Domain, so that others can extend it, alter it, or use the existing characters for own, even more comprehensive fonts.

It is possible that I also start working on it again at some point in the future, but I am giving no promise other than that this website and the downloads offered here stay available for everyone to use for free.

The current version 4.1 contains 11,053 characters (391 of which are new since version 4.0).

New characters

• Greek and Coptic (completed, 1 new character)
• Cyrillic Supplement (completed, 8 new characters)
• Armenian (completed, 2 new characters)
• Runic (completed, 8 new characters)
• Currency Symbols (completed, 3 new characters)
• Miscellaneous Technical (completed, 7 new characters)
• Miscellaneous Symbols and Arrows (completed, 115 new characters)
• Supplemental Punctuation (completed, 17 new characters)
• Cyrillic Extended-B (completed, 6 new characters)
• Latin Extended-D (completed, 18 new characters)
• Latin Extended-E (complete, 50 characters)
• Private Use Area: Control Pictures Extended (6 characters)
• Ancient Greek Numbers (completed, 2 new characters)
• Ancient Symbols (completed, 1 new character)
• Old Italic (completed, 1 new character)
• Ugaritic (complete, 31 characters)
• Playing Cards (completed, 23 new characters)
• Enclosed Alphanumerics Supplement (completed, 2 new characters)
• Miscellaneous Symbols and Pictographs (32 new characters)
• Emoticons (completed, 2 new characters)
• Geometric Shapes Extended (64 characters)

See the characters page for a full overview of supported ranges and characters.

All working combinations from base letters and combining marks are shown in QuiviraCombining.pdf.

Earlier versions are listed in the version history.

¹ On some systems it may be necessary to delete the old .ttf file before you can install the new .otf file. In theory the system should realise that it is the same font, but the changed filename may confuse some.

The aim of this project is a large Unicode font which still looks aesthetically pleasing. Supported scripts (like e.g. Latin, Greek and Cyrillic) shall be supported completely, so Quivira can be used for every language using these scripts.

Of course missing characters can be added from other fonts (this is what many rendering programs do automatically). This is clearly better than showing only a replacement character, but it never looks really good, because the other font certainly uses different character widths, stroke thicknesses and letter and line heights. This is where the large Unicode fonts step in: They help to avoid inappropriate glyphs in multilingual documents.

Anyhow, Quivira will never provide every character defined in the Unicode standard. This would be technically impossible, because a font is limited to 65,536 characters, while Unicode already defines more than 100,000.¹ But due to my restricted amount of free time I will probably never reach this limit anyway.

The main focus of Quivira lies on the most common alphabets (Latin, Greek, Cyrillic and others), additional symbols that can be used in conjunction with them (especially mathematical symbols) and elder scripts still used by scholars (e.g. runes, Gothic, ancient Greek and others). Future additions may be other scripts like e.g. Gə‘əz or Canadian aboriginal syllabics. In contrast, Han ideographs are currently not scheduled for inclusion.² (Other East Asian scripts like Hiragana and Katakana are possible, but have low priority at the moment.)

¹ One possible solution for this problem is the way James Kass solved it: He provided three fonts (Code2000, Code2001 and Code2002) with a common design, each of which covers a different part of the Unicode standard.

² These ideographs are used for Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese. Because of their huge number (more than 70,000) their inclusion would mean a much greater effort than all other characters together. Additionally, they can be replaced by other fonts quite well, because their design significantly differs from all other scripts anyway. However, in future versions Quivira may contain a subset of these, like e.g. the most important ones taught at schools in Asia.