Analysis of the style and supported languages of selected Unicode TTF and OTF fonts

If this is your first visit, please skim down the page to see how I have organized it, and whether you think anything here will be useful to you. For subsequent visits, the following links are to speed up your navigation:

Introduction

My current process

A guide to the files

Files of dummy text to compare fonts

Substitute latin fonts

Fonts with Small Caps

About TrueType Collections

About Variable fonts and font weights

The main table of fonts

A second table with some other fonts

Late additions

Links to where to download the various fonts

Web pages for testing different languages

Changelog

Please send any comments to <zarniwhoop at ntlworld dot com> (plain text only, please), and replace ' at ' and ' dot ' by those symbols.

Bugs

When I attempt to find out which codepoints are in a particular file, sometimes space (U+0020) is not reported for a font which covers at least ASCII.

Introduction

I am not a typographer, but I like the text on my screen to look `nice'. Also, I particularly dislike looking at web pages where I get dotted boxes instead of some of the glyphs - that means my installed fonts are inadequate.

On modern desktop machines there is usually plenty of space to add more fonts. But I do not only consume, I also create a few documents, even printed letters, from time to time - and selecting the desired font is awkward if I have a large number installed. So, for normal use I only install a small subset of fonts and I want maximum coverage and good aesthetics (e.g. in ASCII there are different forms for 'a' and 'g').

My preferred desktop term when I began this was rxvt-unicode. Although I used freetype fonts with that, it does not use fontconfig I have to tell it which fonts to use, in order of preference) and it wants monospaced fonts. For that, maximising coverage for what I will see (mostly, European languages on mailing lists, with some occasional Chinese, Japanese or Korean) was important.

When I first started doing this, the then-current version of libreoffice writer allowed me to tell which glyphs were not in the current font. Recent versionsi can report a font name, even if that font has been installed and then removed, and do not make it easy to confirm which languages a font covers. Gnucharmap can be used to confirm which font is being used.

At that time I produced my files manually, and assembled all the variant latin / cyrillic / greek letters into an attempt at alphabetical order. But that takes a long time and is open to error.

The ugly "boxes with dots" are sometimes called "tofu" (I can see the likeness) and were one of the inspirations behind the Adobe 'Source Sans' fonts which have now been incorporated into google's Noto ('No Tofu') fonts - but most people will never encounter many of the available unicode codepoints (e.g. those for Egyptian Hieroglyphs) so I have restricted my documentation to only those current scripts for which I could find Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in a pastable form: even for a few of these scripts I have no expectation of ever seeing real text.

A guide to the files:

• a codepoint file (all the codepoints it provides), these are in the codepoints directory. If you know the unicode for a codepoint you need, you can grep these.
• a coverage file (listing the range of codepoints in their unicode blocks - I originally worked to Unicode-8.0, but the 2023 updates use unicode-15.0. These files are in the coverage directory but they are not especially useful because some fonts display things wrongly.
• a PDF file which attempts to show all the glyphs, ordered by codepoint, in the PDF-contents directory) - these were created in libreoffice writer. For combining glyphs I have printed them on blank spaces, but for complex scripts (Indic and others) the positioning of glyphs in real words depends on rules, so the results of showing an ascending series of codepoints may not match what will happen when using real text. N.B. Any codepoints less than U+0020 (space) are not shown because conventionally they are control codes.
• a PDF file showing which languages the font supports, based on alphabetic coverage for the Latin, Cyrillic and Greek alphabets, and on whether it covers Article 1 of the UDHR for everything else. These were created in xelatex and are in the PDF-languages directory. Please note that the numbering of sections and subsections is specific to each font, i.e. I only show languages I think are adequately covered by that font.

The easiest way to access all of the above is via the links in the tables which form the main part of this page.

My current PDFs are all at 10pt size - a bit small to read, but any decent viewer will let you zoom in to a bigger size. Using 10pt should make the files smaller.

The names within the PDFs are the name known to fontconfig, but the filenames themselves are based on the name of the (main) font - see the table(s) below.

Files of dummy text to compare fonts

These "lipsum" PDFs are in the PDF-lipsum directory and I recommend them as a way to compare fonts - but you will also need to look at the other files, at least for latin fonts, to see if a font supports the languages you care about.

Fonts which contain Small Capitals

In languages using a latin alphabet, and occasionally in the cyrillic and (monotonic) greek alphabets, it is sometimes useful to use reduced height capitils instead of lowercase letters. See Wikipedia for possible reasons. Although some word-processing programs can scale regular capitals to do this, they usually look lighter and narrower than the regular text, so separate Small Capitals are available in some fonts. I am now revising my 'languages' files to report the availability of Small Caps, as well as the availability of italics and smallcap italics, one font style at a time. I am also updating the 'codepoints files' where Small Caps are available, to show ' +SC' after the unicode value for each available small cap.

Files showing the Small Caps in the supported languages are available at fonts-with-sc

Substitute latin fonts

Fontconfig uses rules (in conf files) to substitute fonts when the requested font is not present, and similarly to substitute individual glyphs where they are not in the chosen font. For latin alphabets, there are examples in the PDF-substitutes directory.

TrueType Collections

About Variable fonts and font weights

My primary purpose with this site is to help people choose fonts to use on linux in web browsers, office apps, and terminals. So, to help you look at the weights of fonts I have created a page here called all-weights.html. You will need to download the page and then edit it to point to the fontconfig name of an installed font family. Until you edit it, only your default sans-serif font will be shown, and that maybe only has normal and bold weights.

My main table of fonts and their names

Some Other Fonts

Late additions