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Support for displaying Unicode text

Intended audience: anyone who needs help finding fonts and other support to display international text.

Question

Where can I find what I need to display Unicode-based international text?

Answer

This page is not yet stable, and has not gone through wide review. It will be added to and improved over time. Please send comments to the www-international list, or contact Richard Ishida if you can supply more details.

Numerous, freely-available fonts can be downloaded from the Web to support international text. The quality of those fonts varies, but we cannot address which fonts are better than others here.

Note that a font alone may not be sufficient. Complex scripts, such as Indian or South-East Asian scripts in particular, may require additional support from the operating system to ensure that the font behaves correctly. Right-to-left scripts such as Arabic and Hebrew require support for the Unicode bidirectional algorithm in the application that displays the text. This will be addressed in a future version of this article.

Fonts

Windows

Mac OS

Unix and Linux computers

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Author: Richard Ishida, W3C.

Valid XHTML 1.0!
Valid CSS!
Encoded in UTF-8!

Content first published 30 March, 2006. Last substantive update 2006-03-30 10:06 GMT. This version 2006-03-30 10:06 GMT

For a summary of significant changes, search for qa-font-finder in the change log.