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SIL Font Subsets
Introduction
Question: What is a font subset?
Answer:
SIL's Non-Roman Script Initiative has created very comprehensive fonts for Latin and Cyrillic character sets. These are very large fonts that cover just about every need we know about in the Latin and Cyrillic world. Now, as we move into the age of mobile phone and web usage, everyone wants fonts that are small and compact. Our fonts are over a megabyte each and that is considered way too big for mobile phone usage.
We are now considering ways to subset our fonts. Current commercial font subsetting schemes remove the smart font information from a font when it subsets a font. While this may be acceptable for majority languages, we consider this unacceptable as so many languages in the world require smart diacritic positioning above and/or below base characters.
List of subsets
Our current plan is to create regional subsets. A first draft of the subsets are listed below. We are fairly certain these lists will not be complete and we would like feedback from people who believe character(s) are missing (or if you believe a character(s) is not required in that set).
With the exception of the phonetic font, the font subsets are intended for orthographic use only. We haven't put anything in those subsets for phonetic, transliteration or transcription use. If phonetic, transliteration or transcription is desired, the phonetic subset is what should be used.
| Download Regional Subset list | Description | ||
| All the Latin font charts have yellow highlights and green highlights. Yellow means those characters are in all the Latin fonts. Green highlights are additional (for that region) to the basic Latin set. | |||
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Africa - Our hope is that all languages of Africa (using the Latin script) would be covered by this font. There are a few variant glyphs that are not represented here. Only the characters highlighted in yellow and green will be included in the subset font. | ||
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Americas — Our hope is that all languages in the Americas (using the Latin script) would be covered by this font. There are a few variant glyphs that are not represented here. For example, some languages in the Americas use the Polish-style ogonek and others use the Retrohook-style ogonek. At this point, our subset uses the Polish-style ogonek. We may change that if we learn the other style is more pervasive. Only the characters highlighted in yellow and green will be included in the subset font. | ||
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Asia/Pacific — This font should include Latin script support for Pinyin, Papua New Guinea, Philippines, languages from India, China and Myanmar and other countries where languages (such as Chin languages) are written with Latin script. There are a few variant glyphs that are not represented here. For example, some languages in Papua New Guinea use one style of U+014A LATIN CAPITAL LETTER ENG and other languages use the other style. It is unclear which is most common. At this point, the Asia/Pacific subset uses the capital-N style. We may change that if we learn the other style is more pervasive. Only the characters highlighted in yellow and green will be included in the subset font. | ||
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Europe/Eurasia — This font should include Latin script support for Europe, Eastern Europe, Turkish, Azerbaijani, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, etc, — all languages in Europe and Eurasia which use the Latin script. Only the characters highlighted in yellow and green will be included in the subset font. | ||
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Vietnam — This font should include Latin script support for traditional Vietnamese (including Vietnamese-style diacritics) plus a few extra characters used by Vietnam's minority languages. Only the characters highlighted in yellow and green will be included in the subset font. | ||
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Phonetic — The intent for this font is to cover all of IPA, other phonetic characters, transliteration, and transcription. Only the characters highlighted in yellow and green will be included in the subset font. Note: In order to differentiate between U+0061 LATIN SMALL LETTER A and U+0251 LATIN SMALL LETTER ALPHA, an italic Phonetic font requires that U+0061 always be a "double-story a" rather than a "single-story a". |
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Cyrillic and Cyrillic Extended — The characters highlighted in yellow will be in the basic Cyrillic subset. The Cyrillic extended font will include all the highlighted characters (both yellow and green). |
Feedback
We would like feedback on these subsets. Please submit information for the characters you feel should be added to a particular subset.
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