Help:Multilingual support
Rendering support for the alphabets of various languages / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Articles on the English Wikipedia may contain words or texts written in different languages and scripts. To be able to correctly view and edit these articles requires that you have the appropriate fonts installed and to have correctly configured your operating system and browser. This guide will help you to do so.
This help page is a how-to guide. It details processes or procedures of some aspect(s) of Wikipedia's norms and practices. It is not one of Wikipedia's policies or guidelines, and may reflect varying levels of consensus and vetting. |
Unicode
Articles on Wikipedia are encoded using Unicode (specifically UTF-8)[lower-alpha 1], an industry standard designed to allow text and symbols from all of the writing systems of the world to be consistently represented and manipulated by computers. Because UTF-8 is backward compatible with ASCII, and most modern browsers have at least basic Unicode support, most users will experience little difficulty reading and editing most of Wikipedia.
Font
Most computers with Microsoft Windows, Apple's macOS and many Linux variants will already have fonts with support for Latin, Greek, Cyrillic, Hebrew, Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Korean and the International Phonetic Alphabet installed. Many mobile devices, such as the iPhone and iPad also include such fonts. Several historic and accented characters (used in the transliteration of foreign scripts) may be missing, though.
Microsoft fonts
Font | Included with | Scripts | Description |
---|---|---|---|
|
Western, Japanese, Hangul, Johab, Big5, GB 2312, Hebrew, Arabic, Greek, Turkish, Baltic, Central European, Celtic, Cyrillic, Thai, Lao, Tibetan, Oriya, Bengali, Devanagari, Gurmukhi, Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam, Tamil, Telugu and Vietnamese | Supports a wide number of scripts, but is of a slightly lower quality than Arial because it lacks kerning and is not smoothed. Contains a minor bug that causes double-wide diacritics to be placed on the wrong characters. | |
|
Western, Hebrew, Greek, Turkish, Baltic, Central European, Cyrillic | Has a much smaller character repertoire than that of Arial Unicode MS, but is more legible. | |
|
Western, Hebrew, Arabic, Greek, Turkish, Baltic, Central European, Celtic, Cyrillic, Thai and Vietnamese | Has a much smaller character repertoire than that of Arial Unicode MS, but is more legible, especially (according to Meta) in terms of Arabic and Persian characters. | |
|
Western, Hebrew, Arabic, Greek, Turkish, Celtic, Baltic, Central European, Cyrillic, Thai, Vietnamese | Has better support for historical and accented Latin characters. |
Other available Unicode fonts
Bolded fonts are recommended.
Font | Typeface | License | Format | Encoding |
---|---|---|---|---|
Aboriginal | Sans-serif, Serif | Freeware | OpenType | Unicode 5.2 |
Charis SIL | Serif | Open Source | OpenType, Graphite | Unicode 7.0 |
Code2002 Archived December 15, 2010, at the Wayback Machine | Freeware (must not be altered) | TrueType | Unicode, plane 2 | |
Code2001 0.919 Archived September 27, 2007, at the Wayback Machine | Freeware (must not be altered) | TrueType | Unicode, plane 1 | |
Code2000 1.171 Archived September 27, 2007, at the Wayback Machine | Serif | Shareware (unrestricted) | TrueType | Unicode, plane 0 |
DejaVu | Sans-serif, Sans-mono, Serif | Open Source | OpenType | Unicode |
Doulos SIL | Serif | Open Source | OpenType, Graphite | Unicode 7.0 |
Everson Mono 3.2b4 | Sans-mono | Shareware | TrueType | Unicode |
Fonts for Ancient Scripts (Greek, Egyptian, cuneiform...) | Varying | No license, but may be used for any purpose | TrueType | Unicode |
Google Noto (Project to support all Unicode scripts) | Sans-serif, Serif | Open Source | OpenType | Unicode |
Hanazono (80,000+ Chinese characters supported) | Ming (comparable to serifed typefaces) | Freeware (unrestricted) | TrueType | Unicode |
Kurinto Font Folio (Project to support all human languages) | 21 typefaces with variants | Open Source (OFL) | TrueType | Unicode 12.1 |
TH-Times (in TH-Tshyn)[Simplified Chinese page] [English page] | Serif | Non-commercial | TrueType | Unicode 15.1 |
TITUS Cyberbit Basic | Serif | Non-commercial | TrueType, but requires Windows to install | Unicode 4.0 |
Quivira | Serif | Freeware | OpenType | Unicode 7.0 |
GNU Unifont | Mono | Freeware (GPL) | TrueType | Unicode 15.0 |
Browsers
- Internet Explorer
- supports Latin (however not all extended sets), Greek, Cyrillic, Arabic and Hebrew. Support for East Asian and some Indic scripts is available if support for this has been installed for Windows. As Internet Explorer will only use the default font for other scripts, those are usually not supported (unless the default font does).
- Firefox
- tries to render any character using all the fonts available on the system so multilingual support is generally good. The default rendering engine can support complex script rendering. Some Linux distributions ship with a Pango-based rendering engine which also does, although this may currently cause some display glitches with justified text.
- Opera
- tries to render any character using all the fonts available on the system so multilingual support is also good.[5] Opera uses the operating system to perform contextual glyph selection, ligature forming, character stacking, combining character support and other character shaping tasks.[6]
- Chrome
- does not directly support several languages of South and Southeast Asian countries, but otherwise renders some tofu signs, due to its problem of font fallback mechanism, you may need the Advanced Font Settings extension to optimize. Renders Devanagari (used for Hindi), Bengali, Sinhala, Gurmukhi, and Tibetan scripts in the examples below, but not some of languages of Southeast Asian countries.