APL Font

Default Font

The default APL font for the site is SImPL medium, SImPL, or APL385 Unicode.

If the APL characters in the articles don't display correctly, you can obtain a copy of the SImPL medium font by downloading the current NARS2000 binary, or the SImPL font from here, or the APL385 Unicode font from here.

If they still don't display correctly, download FireFox.

Font Issues

Even if you have an APL font installed, that may not be the end of the story. Each font designer decides what glyphs to display and for which characters. Also, some implementations of supposedly unicode fonts don't always display the same glyphs in the same places or in the same way. The SimPL Medium font, which comes with NARS2000, will display some characters with different glyphs than are displayed by the font APL385 Unicode. For example, these are the underlined letters A to Z, which are valid identifiers in APL. A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z. Now, to display these characters in APL385 Unicode, the characters use code positions 0x2486 through 0x24CF. The standard Arial font doesn't even have a built-in set of underlined characters, nor does SimPL. (Yet note some glyphs, as shown below, that are used by NARS2000, are not present in APL385.)

Also, the settings for Unicode for APL symbols, which are listed as being 0x2300 - 0x23F3, do not necessarily appear - or appear the same - in all APL fonts. (More Later.)

Extra APL Glyphs

While any Unicode APL font will display all of the standard APL glyphs, NARS2000 uses (or has plans to use) some extra glyphs not found in all Unicode APL fonts such as

Name	Symbol	Unicode Code Point	Keystroke	Description
Section	§	0167 or 0x00A7	Alt-S	Multiset Symmetric Difference
Pi	π	0960 or 0x03C0	Alt-p	Prime Decomposition and Number-theoretic
Root	√	8730 or 0x221A	Alt-R	Square Root and Nth Root
Infinity	∞	8734 or 0x221E	Alt-f	Infinity
Mismatch	≢	8802 or 0x2262	Alt-@	Mismatch
Left-shoe-underbar	⊆	8838 or 0x2286	Alt-Z	Subset of
Right-shoe-underbar	⊇	8839 or 0x2287	Alt-X	Superset of
Circle-middle-dot	⊙	8857 or 0x2299	Alt-?	Null operator
Quad-colon	⍠	9056 or 0x2360	Alt-_	Variant operator
Dieresis-downtack	⍡	9057 or 0x2361	Alt-N	Convolution operator†
Dieresis-del	⍢	9058 or 0x2362	Alt-G	Dual operator†
Dieresis-star	⍣	9059 or 0x2363	Alt-P	Power operator†
Dieresis-jot	⍤	9060 or 0x2364	Alt-J	Rank operator
Dieresis-circle	⍥	9061 or 0x2365	Alt-O	Composition operator
Down-shoe-stile	⍦	9062 or 0x2366	Alt-m	Multiset operator
Dieresis-tilde	⍨	9064 or 0x2368	Alt-T	Commute operator
Zilde	⍬	9068 or 0x236C	Alt-}	Empty simple numeric vector
Stile-tilde	⍭	9069 or 0x236D	Alt-M	Partition operator†

† = Not currently implemented.

All of the above glyphs may be found in SImPL medium, all but the Infinity symbol in SImPL, and all but the Null operator in APL385 Unicode.