[OpenFontLibrary] Google Font Directory

[Jonadab the Unsightly One]

Barry Schwartz <chemoelectric at chemoelectric.org> writes:

> Latin-1 won't get you very far outside of Western Europe. 

Western Europe, most of sub-Saharan Africa (virtually all of
non-Arabic-speaking Africa; languages covered include French, English,
Afrikaans, Sango, Dutch, and almost all local languages and dialects
that are still active), most of Oceania (English, Tok Pisin,
Indonesian, Tagalog, French, Portuguese, Dutch, and most Austronesian
languages), and virtually the entire Western hemisphere.

In other words, most of the non-CJK world.

Again, I'm not arguing that people don't or shouldn't make websites
that use other writing systems.  They do, and that's great.  I'm only
saying that *lots* of people make websites that will only ever use
Latin characters, and *those* websites can benefit greatly from fonts
with the other writing systems stripped out.

> I myself can't get by with it, because I need ĉ ĝ ĥ ĵ ŝ and ŭ for
> Esperanto. I'm not a vast majority of anything, however. :)

I'm not saying you shouldn't make websites in Esperanto.  If you need
non-Latin-1 characters for your Esperanto website, you could either
embed a font that has those characters (surely someone in the
Esperanto community would be willing to host some), or just let the
user's browser select one of the full-unicode fonts installed on the
user's computer.  

But I am not convinced that *every* embeddable font needs to support
Esperanto, or more generally that every embeddable font should support
every writing system.  Most websites only need a limited subset.  In
fact, I would venture to say that most Esperanto sites don't need
Chinese ideographs and will perform significantly better if their
embedded fonts don't have all those thousands of extra characters.

-- 

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