Language support & Web fonts

Unless otherwise indicated, fonts at FontShop contain at least a basic Latin character set, allowing the typographer to set copy in several of the most common western languages: English, Spanish, French, Italian, German, Dutch, and so forth, each with supporting figures and punctuation. Pro packages, or ones marked explicitly CE, tend to cover these, plus more of the Central European languages that share the Latin script: Czech, Polish, Estonian, Lithuanian, etc.. 

Exceptions to the above rule include fonts designed primarily for use in other (non-Latin) scripts and writing systems such as Greek or Cyrillic (though these particular scripts are generally accompanied by a companion Latin). Many others however are not, including Arabic, Hebrew, Indic scripts, and character-based languages such as Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. Checking the Glyphs section of each family is the best place to verify that the characters needed to support the languages for a given project are present.

Character sets for web fonts

The character set of system fonts typically covers the most important languages. As long as these fonts are used on the web, you only have to worry about whether or not the characters are displayed correctly in exceptional cases.

For web fonts, the situation is different. Many web typefaces are derived from simple print fonts that are not as well equipped as the large system fonts when it comes to language. When working on large, international projects, you as web designer must pay very close attention to ensure the fonts used cover all required languages. Here, you not only need to take the editorial section of the website into account, but also the user-generated content – comments, for example.

Before purchasing from our web shop, you can see exactly which character features the new font has. The following list shows the most important codes and the languages they refer to.

Minimal Latin (W00)

• Character set: Minimum selection of Latin characters, numerals, and punctuation, no umlauts
• Supported languages: English, Indonesian
  
  

Minimal Latin SC (W00SC)

• Character set: As above, but small caps
• Supported languages: As above
  
  

Latin 1 (W01)

• Character set: Basic equipment for Western European languages, corresponds to Codepage 1252 and OpenType Std
  
• Supported languages: As above plus Afrikaans, Basque, Breton, Catalan, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, Gaelic, German, Icelandic, Irish, Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Saami, Spanish, Swahili, Swedish
  
  

Latin 1 SC (W01SC)

• Character set: As above, but small caps
• Supported languages: As above
  
  

Latin 1 + OT Features (W03)

• Character set: Such as Latin 1, but with OpenType Features
  
• Supported languages: As above
  
  

Latin Extended 1 (W02)

• Character set: Basic selection for Western and Eastern European languages, corresponds to OpenType Pro
  
• Supported languages: As above plus Croatian, Czech, Estonian, Hungarian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Polish, Romanian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Turkish
  
  

Latin Extended 1 SC (W02SC)

• Character set: As above, but small caps
• Supported languages: As above
  
  

Latin Extended 1 + OT Features (W04)

• Character set: Includes the same glyph coverage as the desktop font.
  
• Supported languages: As above
  
  

Desktop Equivalent (W05)

• Character set: As in Latin Extended 1, but with OpenType Features
  
• Supported languages: Not defined. Depends on the language support of the desktop font.
  
  

Pan-European 1 (W06)

• Character set: Latin Extended + Cyrillic + Greek
  
• Supported languages: As above plus Avar, Balkar, Belarusian, Bulgarian, Chechen, Erzya, Ingush, Lezgian, Macedonian, Moldavian, Ossetian, Russian, Serbian, Ukrainian, Greek
  
  

Multilingual & OT Features (W08)

• Character set: Very large character selection without a defined language coverage
  
• Supported languages: Not defined, needs to be analyzed from case to case
  
  

Cyrillic (W10)

• Character set: Corresponds to Codepage 1251
• Supported languages: English, Avar, Balkar, Belarusian, Bulgarian, Chechen, Erzya, Ingush, Lezgian, Macedonian, Moldavian, Ossetian, Russian, Serbian, Ukrainian English, Greek
  
  

Greek (W15)

• Character set: Corresponds to Codepage 1253 for Monotonic Greek
• Supported languages: English, Greek
  
  

Symbol (W95)

• Character set: Pi and symbol font
  
  
  

Rudimentary (W90)

• Character set: A–Z