Unifont(EX)'s (LGBTQ+) Allure

UnifontEX has attracted quite a few Github users from various walks of life and regions, including ones I didn’t expect, like Florida, Iran, China, and Russia. And as I’ve mentioned before, both Chinese and Japanese people are OK with the Han glyph shapes being Kanji.

I’ve also seen quite a few LGBTQ+ users, which makes sense given that I’m literally MOGAI and proud of it. But this is about UnifontEX, I hear you say, and the title says Unifont(EX). Well, it turns out that the very creator of Unifont back in the 1990s is an intersex bi poly cis guy, and one of the more-recent developers of Unifont is a transbian. And then there’s me, a pan, poly, intersex nonbinary person. From this, one could argue that Unifont and its derivatives attract LGBTQ+ people like hotcakes. I’m proud to have it as my UI font on Android and Linux! Also, happy Pride!

Now in terms of my community interactions, apart from the current lead designer of Unifont, and the transbian recent addition to the team, I’ve been quite lone-wolf, though I have shared the font and talked about it practically everywhere. It DID get used in the game Gem Frenzy and a Roblox mod, plus a list of coding fonts, so that is cool. People on the Fediverse praise it.

It also has been used by JetBrains developers in spite of the company having their own coding font with FAR less glyphs, and one of FFmpeg’s devs uses it. I’ve also seen MANY foreign developers use it, plus a Chinese font company and some other Chinese Unicode nerds. I personally am fine with people using it.

Also I use it for infographics (even the pride ones). Funnily-enough, it even has furry community gender symbols by accident, same for the nonbinary and pangender symbols, plus the Rumpus Parable 2014 Agender Flag and the old Salmacian/Aphrodisian symbol. So this font is very LGBTQ+, and openly so. Yet, Chinese, Russian, Floridian, and Iranian users use it, which surprised me, same for the JetBrains dev. I guess people consider the project useful enough to not care what their overlords think, and I am honored to have that esteem.