Jonathan Dowland: debian swirl font glyph

When I wrote about the redhat logo in a shell prompt,
a commenter said it would be nice to achieve something similar for Debian, and
suggested “🍥” (U+1F365 FISH CAKE WITH SWIRL DESIGN) which, in some renderings,
looks to have a red swirl on top. This is not bad, but I thought we could do
better.

On Apple systems, the character “” (U+F8FF) displays as the corporate
Apple logo. That particular unicode code point is reserved: systems are free
to use it for something private and internal, but other systems won’t use it
for the same thing. So if an Apple user tries to send a document with that
character in it to someone else, they won’t see the Apple unless they are also
viewing it on an Apple computer. (Some folks use it for Klingon).

Here’s a font that maps the Debian swirl to the same code point.
It’s covered by the Debian logo license terms.

Nerd Font maps the Debian swirl logo to codepoints e77d, f306, ebc5 and
f08da (all of which are also in the Private Use Area). I’ve gone ahead and mapped
it to all those points but the last one (simply because I couldn’t find it in FontForge.)

Note that, unless your recipients have this font, or the Nerd Font, or similar
set up, they aren’t going to see the swirl. But enjoy it for private use. Getting
your system to actually use the font is, I’m afraid, left as an exercise for the
reader (but feel free to leave comments)

Thanks to mirabilos for chatting to me about this back in 2019. It’s taken me
that long to get this blog post out of draft!