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

Multilingual

Any OpenType Features

Basic Latin/English letters

Uppercase

Lowercase

West European diacritics

Euro

Digits

Old-style Digits

Ligatures

Extra Ligatures

Small Caps

Historical Forms

Central Europe

Baltic

Turkish

Romanian

Vietnamese

Phonetic

Cyrillic

Cyrillic Extended (Central Asian)

Greek Modern

Greek Polytonic

Armenian

Georgian

Arabic

Hebrew

Indic and East Asian

Thai

Hiragana (Basic Japanese)

Katakana (Basic Japanese)

Hanzi/Kanji (Chinese/Japanese/Korean)

Korean

OpenType Alternates

OpenType Contextual

OpenType Fractions

OpenType Swash

OpenType Superscript

OpenType Subscript

Other OpenType

Dingbats & Symbols

Unicode Private Use Area

Misc

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