Large, multi-script Unicode fonts for Windows computers (original) (raw)

Alan Wood’s Unicode Resources

Large, multi-script fonts WGL4, symbol and SMP fonts European fonts African fonts American fonts Central Asian fonts East Asian fonts Middle Eastern fonts South Asian fonts Southeast Asian fonts Philippine fonts Unicode fonts by range Unicode fonts for Mac OS 9 Unicode fonts for Mac OS X Unicode fonts for Unix Suppliers of commercial Unicode fonts Links to font-related and language-related Web sites

The number of Windows TrueType and OpenType fonts that support Unicode is slowly increasing. One of the first was Lucida Sans Unicode from Bigelow & Holmes, supplied with a pre-release SDK for Microsoft Windows NT 3.1 in March 1993. Bitstream also had an experimental Unicode font, CyberBit, freely available from Netscape for several years. The core fonts (Arial, Times New Roman and Courier New) for Windows platforms were converted to Unicode even before Microsoft changed to the 16-bit WGL4 character set (652 characters) in place of the 8-bit ANSI character set (256 characters), and the numbers of characters in these fonts has continued to increase. Many of Microsoft’s operating systems and applications come with additional Unicode fonts, and Office 2000 onwards includes Arial Unicode MS, which includes all of the characters in version 2.0 of the Unicode standard. There is also a large shareware Unicode fonts, Code2000.

You need Unicode fonts to display many of the characters for which there are HTML 4.0 character entity references, and to display the Unicode test pages.

With the latest core fonts for Windows, you can add a suitable keyboard layout (from the Language tab in the Keyboard section of Control Panel), and then select a layout from the icon tray in the taskbar and start typing in a different language – without needing to change fonts:

Selecting a keyboard layout in Windows 95

You can find out if your Windows fonts support Unicode by using the extensions that Microsoft supplies for the Properties tab that is available when a TrueType (.TTF) font file is right-clicked in Windows Explorer. Amongst other things, these extensions provide statistics on the number of glyphs and on the Ranges and Code Pages that are supported. The extensions are available from http://www.microsoft.com/typography/property/property.htm.

Checking the Ranges and the code pages supported by a TrueType font

The Fonts and products page on Microsoft’s Web site provides access to information about many fonts, including where to obtain them, and also provides lists of fonts that are supplied with many products.

The following list of large Unicode fonts is probably not comprehensive, it is just the ones that I have acquired with various operating systems and applications, or found while learning about Unicode from the Web. It does not include Unicode fonts from commercial suppliers. Not all of the characters in a given range will always be present in a font; you can use a utility such as Babel Map to see exactly which characters are included.

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Large, multi-script fonts (more than WGL4)


Suppliers of commercial Unicode fonts



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Copyright © 1999–2011 Alan Wood

Created 27th September 1999 Last updated 10th January 2011

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