International
Introduction
If you need to set text in languages such as Russian and Hebrew, or other languages not covered by the standard Windows and Apple Mac character sets, it can be difficult finding the font that has everything you want, in terms of style and languages covered.
This page shows you how to find fonts in the languages you need.
How to find fonts for your language
There are several ways to find fonts in your language at MyFonts. The easiest for now are:
- Simply type phrases such as 'greek sans-serif' or 'russian garamond' in to the Search box.
- Go to the Detailed Search page and restrict the fonts you want to particular character sets.
- Keep your eye out for the square, colored multi-lingual icons (shown below by each character set) – they show you the languages supported by any fonts you see at MyFonts.
- More ways to explore multi-lingual typography coming soon!
How computers store texts in different languages
Computers store text as series of numbers. This means that if you select a font and type a letter in your word processor, the memory of the computer stores a number (a code) that corresponds to that particular letter. Each character (letter, digit, special character) is represented by a different code, e.g. the letter "A" is usually stored as 65. A list of codes and the corresponding characters is called an encoding table or a codepage.
Until recent years, computers used a single byte to store each character. Although storage could be efficient, a normal document could only reference 256 different characters. Documents also needed to specify a “code page” to indicate which set of 256 characters was being referenced. (Most operating systems have a default code page, which is used for less sophisticated applications.) The industry postponed finding a solution for this serious problem, perhaps partly because it remained largely hidden from English-speaking users: they typically used only the unaccented Latin letters, which handily occupy the same positions in most code pages.
In the last few years, most operating systems are able to handle Unicode, which is a large and well-defined set of characters. Most characters are represented using a 2-byte code (which gives 65,536 different characters), although even more are possible using 4-byte codes. The supposed problems of efficiency are not significant with today’s computers: in fact, multi-byte text compresses down to just about as small as single-byte text.
More information about Unicode in conjunction with OpenType can be found on our OpenType page.
Please let us know your impressions of our methods for finding multi-language fonts. If you cannot find fonts quickly, we want to know!
Unicode
A font that is marked with this icon contains characters that are encoded using the Unicode Standard.
Multilingual
A font that is marked with this icon contains extended characters for multilingual support.
Any OpenType Features
A font that is marked with this icon contains advanced typographic OpenType Layout features that allow OpenType-savvy applications to access extended characters and alternate glyphs .
Basic Latin/English letters
A font that is marked with this icon contains basic Roman/Latin/English letters (A-Z and a-z).
Uppercase
A font that is marked with this icon contains uppercase Roman/Latin/English letters (A-Z).
Lowercase
A font that is marked with this icon contains lowercase Roman/Latin/English letters (a-z).
West European diacritics
A font that is marked with this icon contains diacritics for Western European languages.
Euro
A font that is marked with this icon contains the euro currency symbol (€).
Digits
A font that is marked with this icon contains European digits (0-9).
Old-style Digits
A font that is marked with this icon contains old-style (floating) digits, available usually in OpenType-savvy applications.
Ligatures
A font that is marked with this icon contains standard ligatures such as fi or fl, available usually in OpenType-savvy applications.
Extra Ligatures
A font that is marked with this icon contains additional ligatures, available usually in OpenType-savvy applications.
Small Caps
A font that is marked with this icon contains small caps, available usually in OpenType-savvy applications.
Historical Forms
A font that is marked with this icon contains historical alternates such as the long s, available in OpenType-savvy applications.
Central Europe
A font that is marked with this icon contains Central European Latin-based diacritics.
Baltic
A font that is marked with this icon contains Baltic diacritics.
Turkish
A font that is marked with this icon contains Turkish diacritics.
Romanian
A font that is marked with this icon contains Romanian diacritics.
Vietnamese
A font that is marked with this icon contains Vietnamese diacritics.
Phonetic
A font that is marked with this icon contains phonetic (IPA) characters.
Cyrillic
A font that is marked with this icon contains basic Cyrillic letters, mostly for Russian, Bulgarian, Serbian and Ukrainian.
Cyrillic Extended (Central Asian)
A font that is marked with this icon contains extended Cyrillic letters, mostly for Central Asian (ex-Soviet) languages.
Greek Modern
A font that is marked with this icon contains modern (monotonic) Greek letters.
Greek Polytonic
A font that is marked with this icon contains classical (polytonic) Greek letters.
Armenian
A font that is marked with this icon contains Armenian letters.
Georgian
A font that is marked with this icon contains Georgian letters.
Arabic
A font that is marked with this icon contains Arabic-script characters.
Hebrew
A font that is marked with this icon contains Hebrew characters.
Indic and East Asian
A font that is marked with this icon contains characters from Indic and East Asian scripts such as Devanagari, Bengali, Gurmukhi, Gujarati, Oriya, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam etc..
Thai
A font that is marked with this icon contains Thai characters.
Hiragana (Basic Japanese)
A font that is marked with this icon contains basic Japanese Hiragana characters.
Katakana (Basic Japanese)
A font that is marked with this icon contains basic Japanese Katakana characters.
Hanzi/Kanji (Chinese/Japanese/Korean)
A font that is marked with this icon contains Hanzi/Kanji characters for Chinese, Japanese or Korean.
Korean
A font that is marked with this icon contains Korean Hangul syllable characters.
OpenType Alternates
A font that is marked with this icon contains OpenType stylistic alternates and stylistic sets, available in OpenType-savvy applications.
OpenType Contextual
A font that is marked with this icon contains OpenType contextual features, available in OpenType-savvy applications.
OpenType Fractions
A font that is marked with this icon contains OpenType fractions, available in OpenType-savvy applications.
OpenType Swash
A font that is marked with this icon contains OpenType swashes, available in OpenType-savvy applications.
OpenType Superscript
A font that is marked with this icon contains OpenType superscript characters, available in OpenType-savvy applications.
OpenType Subscript
A font that is marked with this icon contains OpenType subscript characters, available in OpenType-savvy applications.
Other OpenType
A font that is marked with this icon contains other OpenType Layout features.
Dingbats & Symbols
A font that is marked with this icon contains symbols, dingbats, pictograms etc..
Unicode Private Use Area
A font that is marked with this icon contains custom characters encoded in the Unicode Private Use Area.
Misc
A font that is marked with this icon contains miscellaneous.
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