Typophile

yogh in system fonts?

Dave Williams

...any system fonts got a yogh in ’em?

Which system do you refer to?

;-)

Windoze. (XP in my case; I'm just hoping to email someone and wonder if there's a hope in hell of them actually seeing the yogh... like if I needed to use an interrobang, I'd know Palatino Linotype was safe...)
I thought Arial Unicode or Lucida Sans Unicode would be a good bet, but it seems not.

Microsoft Sans Regular, Tahoma, Times New Roman

MS Sans: aha! Thanks Chris. That'll do.
Tahoma, TNR: not in my version :-S

That's really odd -- I'd never noticed that Arial Unicode lacks yogh. Who would make a font which includes wynn but not yogh?

André

@André: yeah, seems a bit odd, doesn't it? It's got other characters that use (what would probably be) the same glyph – zhe and dze and what-have-you...

@Nina: that's a handy link, thanks. On this system (and this is at work, not on my OWN machine) it shows only two fonts with yogh: MS Sans as Chris suggested, and a pixel-font I made myself (LOL). Palatino's got a sort of spiral at that character code, and Zapfino's got something that might be a double prime or a quotation mark...
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Yogh and wynn are included in the Modern Suite.


The glyphs conform to the same design principles as the other characters, because it seemed odd to import blatantly old-style construction into a modern face.

Too bad the Modern Suite isn't a system font, eh Nick?

Kent, Typophile posts are my preferred vehicle of self-promotion :-)

Now home and on a Vista machine; here I do see the yogh in TNR and Tahoma (using Nina's link). Also Segoe UI, and Courier New, amongst a few others. Goes to show that updates to fonts from version to version mean you can't necessarily trust that someone with what appears to be the same font will have access to the same character set...

In Windows 7, yogh (and many other characters) has been added also to Cambria, Calibri and Consolas.

On Macs, UnicodeChecker can find & display any character in any font. But it doesn't say if that font comes with the system ...

> UnicodeChecker

This looks quite useful! Thanks for the link.

Kent, would you care to comment on whether the ClearType fonts are system fonts?

IMO, a font may be shipped (bundled) with an OS, but that doesn't make it a system font, which strictly speaking is required to run the OS.

FYI Arial Unicode is supplied with Office (not Windows) and hasn't been updated in many years. So probably shouldn't be considered a system font, at least not a Windows system font.

@Nick: OK, well what I meant by system font in my original question was a font bundled with the OS, so that I could safely assume that another user of a Windows system would definitely have it. Perhaps I misused the terminology: ...semantics, meh. Since MS Sans falls within both definitions that sorted me out wrt that. The subsequent discussions have been interesting nonetheless! :-D

BTW, agree with you on keeping the design of the character in keeping with whatever level of modernity the rest of the font has. I've read more than one linguistics book where the author has had to use yogh (and wynn, etc.) in discussions of OE, and the thing has stuck out like a sore thumb because it didn't look like it belonged to the same font...

@si: thanks, didn't know that.
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Ever since I chose to block pop-ups, my toaster's stopped working.

> Kent, Typophile posts are my preferred vehicle of self-promotion.

I'm right there with you, Nick. (I was poking gentle fun, because I know your position on bundled fonts.)

But you raise a good question about the definition. Technically, I think you're probably right. But I think the more commonly understood usage of the term "system fonts" in this context is any fonts bundled with the system.

On Macs, UnicodeChecker can find & display any character in any font. But it doesn’t say if that font comes with the system ...

If system fonts are those in the folder /system/library/fonts, then Helvetica, Lucida Grande and Menlo are system fonts on OS X 10.6 that contain U+021C.

In Windows 7, yogh (and many other characters) has been added also to Cambria, Calibri and Consolas.

John, is Constantia being similarly expanded? Are there plans?

My understanding is that Arial Unicode never got further than Unicode 2.1. yogh was added to Unicode in version 3.0. That's why it is missing.

John, is Constantia being similarly expanded? Are there plans?

No immediate plans of which I am aware. But if enough of you contact MS with a request for an expanded Constantia, it might happen. Ideally, all the CT fonts would be brought up to the same level of Unicode support. It's a bigger job than for most other MS fonts, because the CT fonts all have proper smallcap support.

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