It has a subset hint where you can tell it languages you think you will need. Google Fonts has tools to be smarter about which subsets are downloaded in a browser. Which is why most web fonts only worry about the top few languages for download speed optimization.

If you aren't localizing to a particular language and you don't allow user content, you don't have to worry about a web font covering those glyphs. (Though people will sometimes try, or make crazy bad accidents happen.)īut, you mostly only have to worry about languages your webpage is outputting anyway. In general, it's hard to break browser fallback to system fonts for languages/glyphs that aren't available. The usual advice is that you make sure you have plenty of font fallback options that may already be on the user's machine, and why most CSS font-family snippets always end in a wide, generic display class such as 'serif' and 'sans-serif'.

If you want an example, install the CJK font 'Hana Mincho' and type some English text in it: It looks atrocious. Rarely do typographic concepts translate well between scripts. It really only makes sense to try to support every script for fallback fonts like Unifont. As someone who deals with multiple different scripts on my computer, I always hated the fonts that try to set a uniform style for every script when many of the designers clearly had no idea how many of these scripts worked. Later he even talks about how the Cyrillic characters in his font seem completely wrong to actual users of Cyrillic because he can't read Cyrillic. Seems like most of the time spent on Inter was the result of the creator not properly limiting his scope. > Within the first year, before making it open source, I had something that covered the 200 most common Latin characters.

Then, there's the Greek alphabet which is similar to Latin as well as Cyrillic.

Only a small portion of them are Latin-based. How do you define 'core set of glyphs'? There are more than 150 different written scripts in the world - at least those that are well-recognized.

Akzidenz grotesk font github