As of May 2019[update], the GNU Unifont has complete coverage of the Basic Multilingual Plane as defined in Unicode 12.1.0.

For version 12.1.02, Unifont JP was released, which covers 10,000 Japanese kanji present in the JIS X 0213 character set, some of which are in the Supplementary Ideographic Plane.

[4]: Wen Quan Yi: Spring of Letters Unifont stores only one glyph per printable Unicode code point.

Because of this, it does not feature the OpenType features needed to render scripts with complex layouts correctly, and it does not correctly position the combining diacritics with base letters if these combinations are not encoded in Unicode in their pre-combined form; the contextual forms (including joining types, and subjoined clusters) are not handled as well.

Unifont is then intended to only be used as a "last resort" default font, suitable for simple alphabetic scripts, or to render isolated characters, but will make actual texts difficult or sometimes impossible to read correctly.

For correctly rendering Indic abugidas (and semitic abjads if they are written with their optional combining diacritics), other fonts should be specified before this one, and additional fonts will be needed to cover Han ideographs encoded in supplementary planes, or to render most historic (or minority modern) scripts not encoded in the BMP.

Unifont, as of version 15.0.6, is available in TTF (and OTF), BDF, PCF, .hex, and PSF formats for the "standard build".

[4] The actual organization of the source consists of smaller .hex files to be stitched together and converted to other formats in a build.

[5] Luis Alejandro González Miranda wrote scripts to vectorize and convert the BDF font to TrueType format using FontForge.

The earliest way is the hexdraw Perl script, which converts the string into an ASCII art representation to be edited in a text editor.

In 2008, Luis Alejandro González Miranda wrote a program to convert Unifont into a TrueType font.

Later, Richard Stallman published Unifont as a GNU package in October 2013, with Paul Hardy as its maintainer.