APL Font

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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 § 0x00A7 Alt-S Multiset Symmetric Difference
Pi π 0x03C0 Alt-p Prime Decomposition and Number-theoretic
Root 0x221A Alt-R Square Root and Nth Root
Infinity 0x221E Alt-f Infinity
Mismatch 0x2262 Alt-@ Mismatch
Left-shoe-underbar 0x2286 Alt-Z Subset of
Right-shoe-underbar 0x2287 Alt-X Superset of
Circle-middle-dot 0x2299 Alt-? Null operator
Quad-colon 0x2360 Alt-_ Variant operator
Dieresis-downtack 0x2361 Alt-N Convolution operator
Dieresis-del 0x2362 Alt-G Dual operator
Dieresis-star 0x2363 Alt-P Power operator
Dieresis-jot 0x2364 Alt-J Rank operator
Dieresis-circle 0x2365 Alt-O Composition operator
Down-shoe-stile 0x2366 Alt-m Multiset operator
Dieresis-tilde 0x2368 Alt-T Commute operator
Zilde 0x236C Alt-} Empty simple numeric vector
Stile-tilde 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.