Character sets are made up of the characters needed for any specific language. Some characters appear in multiple characters sets while others are specific to a certain set.English (U.S. English, specifically) is my only language and I admit that my knowledge and experience with other languages is limited. This site focuses primarily on fonts and characters for English and other languages that use the Latin-1 or Western European Character set (ISO 8859-1). However, you may occasionally find a need for additional special characters not found in the fonts you use most of the time.
There are at least 10 different standardized character sets: Latin-1 through Latin-6 plus Cyrillic, Arabic, Greek, and Hebrew. Latin-1 includes characters for English, French, Spanish, Dutch, German, and several other languages spoken in Western Europe, the Americas, Australia, and much of Africa. Latin-2 includes characters needed to write Czech, Hungarian, Polish, and other Central and Eastern Europe languages. There are many characters common to both sets. (To see what languages the other character sets cover see The ISO 8859 Alphabet Soup by Roman Czyborra.)
The common diacriticals found in the Latin-1 character set include only a small portion of the alphabet with cedilla, tilde, acute, grave, umlaut (diaeresis), or circumflex accents. If you need something such as the capital S with a cedilla or lowercase r with an acute you'll need to turn to other character sets. Additionally, you'll usually need a character set other than Latin-1 for letters with breve, ogonek, and several other marks.
Before you begin scouring the Web, check out some of the special character fonts you may already have on your system, such as Arial Special G1. Use Character Map or some other character utility to view the complete font and find the keyboard commands to insert these special characters into your document. Here are some Microsoft fonts found on my own system that include various characters beyond Latin-1 (but not all).
- Arial Special G1
- Arial Special G2
- Times New Roman Special G1
- Times New Roman Special G2
When you need more than the occasional glyph, then browse these Language Fonts Beyond Western Europe to find freeware, shareware, and commercial fonts.
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