It just means that accented characters that are used in Central and Eastern Europe are included in the font. Standard Western Latin fonts, which support English, Spanish, French, German, and a few other Western European languages, don't usually include these characters.

I'm of the opinion that any type designer really interested in selling their fonts would automatically include all of the diacri./accent marks now. You never know, even in the middle of Iowa, when you might need them.

"You never know, even in the middle of Iowa, when you might need them."

They even come in handy when doing your icon :-)

ChrisL

A lot of OpenType fonts include CE support. The CE designation is a holdover from older font formats which had more limited character sets and, therefore, couldn't support more than a few languages per font.

So in English does it basically means that there isnt any pronounced effect when you use the CE versions of any font for normal uses like the ones I do?

Hey what happened to the serif/sans question? Please Someone! Your opinions are appreciated and valued.

It makes no difference to the user of non-CE text because those glyphs are not used. The typical Latin characters are the same.

ChrisL

PS: see Eureka sans and Roman as a pairing.
http://www.myfonts.com/fonts/fontfont/ff-eureka-sans/

http://www.myfonts.com/fonts/fontfont/ff-eureka/

I’m of the opinion that any type designer really interested in selling their fonts would automatically include all of the diacri./accent marks now.

ALL of them??? There are a lot of them...

So should i do these and these?

I think at this point, it'd be more usefull to do Cyrillic and Greek extensions, but that's just my oppinion.

I would say that the more you're interested in selling, the less you'd be interested in diacritics, at least beyond the EU countries. There's no money in it. And the only reason there's money in Central/Eastern European diacritics is that the EU requires documents to be created in all the union's official languages. This in fact seems to be the main reason for the contemporary surge in Greek fonts. Fortunately, there is however still craft, decency and graciousness in making extended fonts!

hhp

"ALL of them??? There are a lot of them…"

Yes, Paul. ALL of them...NOW GET TO WORK! :)

sure thing, boss!

;^D

oh. :^/ sorry. i shouldn't use that word, all, it gets me into trouble every time. ;^)

LordKV, I can think of no more exciting contemporary superfamily of type, combining sans and serif fonts than Joshua Darden's "Freight". You can see the fonts on his site: http://www.joshuadarden.com/ , and follow his link to garagefonts/Phil's to make your purchase.

As for accents... I personally like 'em, and like makin' em, even though I have heard people deriding the "glyph arms race". I was put on to this site - http://www.eki.ee/letter/ - and use it to learn which accented letters are necessary for which languages. Referring to this site is a good way of adding accents intelligently. If you're a schwa away from your font working in Azerbaijani, then you can design those glyphs and add them to your font. And when someone asks, "Does your font support Azerbaijani?" You can reply, "Yes! And Tatar as well!"

But as for the less esoteric accents which are used in Eastern Europe... They are pretty useful to anyone wanting to show respect to people whose names contain those accents. (The next step is to learn how to pronounce those accented letters.)

Wow Thanks Everyone. Appreciate it. For once I know something besides the basics of fonts and its all thanks to you guys here. This forum rocks. Joshua Darden’s “Freight” is superb. Will give it a try.

LordKV

You can find useful information about CE diacritics at 'Project Diacritics' - http://diacritics.typo.cz.

Chris L wrote: "It makes no difference to the user of non-CE text because those glyphs are not used. The typical Latin characters are the same."

Single-byte CE fonts omit support for western European languages such as French, Spanish, German, etcetera. The correct statement would be "It makes no difference to us monolingual English-writing folks, because the non-accented Latin characters are the same."

Cheers,

T

Thanks for the clarification Thomas. I was including the Spanish, German, Italian, French, etc., characters as "typical Latin characters" because they typically appear in most text fonts. I was trying to avoid the English-centric issue and be more inclusive of other common Latin based characters and languages.
I should have said: "It makes no difference to the user who does not require the CE glyphs because the rest of the glyphs space and behave just as they would in a font that does not contain the CE set of glyphs."
I was just trying to reassure him that buying a font that included CE would not render it useless for the rest of the Latin based languages.

ChrisL

The reality in Central Europe is little bit different. There are many CE fonts (mostly Adobe typefaces) localized in the middle of 90s. Such fonts have completely redesigned diacritics - not only for CE characters, but for all accented ones. Many western designers don't care about the look of the diacritics and the original accents look very ugly. Unfortunately in languages such Czech or Slovak almost every word contains at least one accent. Therefore correct shape, size and position is very important. Even now, to successfully use new fonts, the change of diacritics in many commercially available CE font is a must.

"Even now, to successfully use new fonts, the change of diacritics in many commercially available CE font is a must."

I hope that means that business is good for you Filip :-)

ChrisL

I took a closer look at all the things people wrote here and I saw that the request to suggest Sans / Serif combinations was merely touched in one or two answers, so I will express my personal prefferences:

Compatil (with its four variants) is awesome.
FF Fago Sans and Serif
FF Quadraat Sans and Serif
FF Zine Sans / Serif
Foundry Form Sans ans Serif

all pretty suitable both for display and text setting needs.

Font Bureau's Stainless and Dispatch are also something to look for.
Also, Gerard Unger's Vesta (or his earlier Argo) and Swift should do the task.