Language features and 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 table shows the most important codes and the languages they refer to.

Name Description Supported Languages
Minimal Latin (W00) Minimum selection of Latin characters, numerals, and punctuation, no umlauts English, Indonesian
Minimal Latin SC (W00SC) As above, but small caps As above
Latin 1 (W01) Basic equipment for Western European languages, corresponds to Codepage 1252 and OpenType Std 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) As above, but small caps As above
Latin 1 + OT Features (W03) Such as Latin 1, but with OpenType Features As above
Latin Extended 1 (W02) Basic selection for Western and Eastern European languages, corresponds to OpenType Pro As above plus Croatian, Czech, Estonian, Hungarian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Polish, Romanian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Turkish
Latin Extended 1 SC (W02SC) As above, but small caps As above
Latin Extended 1 + OT Features (W04) As in Latin Extended 1, but with OpenType Features As above
Desktop Equivalent (W05) Includes the same glyph coverage as the desktop font. Not defined. Depends on the language support of the desktop font.
Pan-European 1 (W06) Latin Extended + Cyrillic + Greek As above plus Avar, Balkar, Belarusian, Bulgarian, Chechen, Erzya, Ingush, Lezgian, Macedonian, Moldavian, Ossetian, Russian, Serbian, Ukrainian, Greek
Multilingual & OT Features (W08) Very large character selection without a defined language coverage Not defined, needs to be analyzed from case to case
Cyrillic (W10) Corresponds to Codepage 1251 English, Avar, Balkar, Belarusian, Bulgarian, Chechen, Erzya, Ingush, Lezgian, Macedonian, Moldavian, Ossetian, Russian, Serbian, Ukrainian English, Greek
Greek (W15) Corresponds to Codepage 1253 for Monotonic Greek English, Greek
Symbol (W95) Pi and symbol font
Rudimentary (W90) A–Z
All details are without guarantee.