Nicholas Bodley wrote:

> [...]
>
> Macchiato has a delightful Web page...
> <http://www.macchiato.com/unicode/show.html>
> that uses Javascript to show the glyph for (apparently)
> *every* Unicode code point, [...]
>
> I'm curious to know where it gets its glyphs from!

Most browsers have a "show source code" menu command that allows you to read
the script contained in the top frame. Even if you don't know the JavaScript
programming language, it is easy to recognize the piece of code which builds
the URL for each character's picture:

doc.write('<img src="http://www.unicode.org/gifs/24/',
hexValue.substring(0,hexValue.length-2), '/U', hexValue,
'.gif" alt="', hexValue, '">');

Assuming that the character code contained in variable <hexValue> is 262E
(the peace symbol), what the above code does is inserting in the bottom
frame the following HTML code:

<img src="http://www.unicode.org/gifs/24/26/U262E.gif" alt="262E">

This HTML code simply shows a picture stored in a subdirectory of the
Unicode Consortium's server, namely:

http://www.unicode.org/gifs/24/26/U262E.gif

The "26" directory name is the first two (or more) hexadecimal digits in the
character code; the picture's filename is clearly the whole character code
with an "U" prefix and a ".gif" suffix.

I think that the "24" directory in the URL means "24 pixels in height", so I
guess that the Unicode's server contains at least another collection of
GIF's with a different size.

Mike Davis, the owner of www.macchiato.com and author of this script, is one
of the inventors of Unicode and the current chairman of the Unicode
Consortium, so he clearly has a good understanding of the data present on
his own organization's web server, and exploited it to craft this little
piece of magic.

> One thinks there's something like a complete Unicode font hiding

somewhere.

No, I don't think such a thing exists. AFAIK, current font technologies
(including TrueType/OpenType) would not even allow you to have so many
characters into a single font.

But, of course, there must exist at least one *collection* of fonts
containing all the Unicode character, or it wouldn't have been possible to
publish "The Unicode Standard" book.

_ Marco