How to convert unusual unicode characters (UTF-8)

Question

I would like to convert a text file containing Unicode characters in UTF-8 to a PDF file. When I cat the file or look at it with vim, everything is great, but when I open the file with LibreOffice, the formatting is off. I have tried various fonts, none of which have worked. Is there a font file somewhere on my Ubuntu 16.04 system which is used for display in a terminal window? It seems that would be the font to tell LibreOffice to use.

I am not attached to LibreOffice. Any app that will convert the text file into a PDF file is fine. I have tried txt2pdf and pandoc without success.

This is what the file looks like

To be more specific about the problem, below is an example of what the above lines look like in LibreOffice using Liberation Mono font (no mono font does better):

Answer 1

I answered to you by mail, but here is the answer. You are using some very specific characters; the most difficult to find being in the Miscellaneous Symbols unicode block. For instance the SESQUIQUADRATE which sould is on your second line as ⚼.

A quick search lead me to the two following candidates (for monospace fonts):

• Everson Mono
• GNU Unifont

As you can see, the block is partially covered by PragmataPro which is a very good font; however, I tried with an old version and found all your own characters, but an issue occured because the Sun character (rendered as ☉) seems to be printed twice wider than the other characters, but my version of this font is rather old and perhaps buggy.

Once you have chosen the font suiting your needs, you may be able to render your documents as PDF with various tools. I made all my experiments with txt2pdf which I use daily for many documents.