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"If you mostly\u00A0read English or other Romance or Germanic languages, you've been spoiled for choice\u00A0with\u00A0digital fonts. The Latin alphabet has long been the subject of intense typographical exploration, with thousands\u00A0of fonts\u00A0available in more\u00A0styles and weights than most non-designers\u00A0would ever think\u00A0necessary. Readers of non-Latin scripts \u2014 like Chinese, Hindi or\u00A0Hebrew \u2014 have never enjoyed such diversity.\nNow\u00A0the globalization of fonts is erasing\u00A0this disparity. Type\u00A0design and delivery might seem esoteric, but the flattening world\u00A0of type\u00A0actually\u00A0speaks volumes about the economic and technological changes that are creating a truly global Internet.\nDelivering specialized content\u00A0is easier than ever\nSome kind of digital typeface\u00A0has\u00A0been available\u00A0for the\u00A0most\u00A0widely used scripts for a long time.\u00A0Microsoft\u00A0Windows 2000, for instance, had\u00A0pretty impressive support\u00A0for its time, including Thai, Georgian and Vietnamese.\u00A0But until very recently, all the fonts \u2014 digital representations of typefaces \u2014 displayed on a computer or smartphone had to be\u00A0installed on those devices\u2019 operating systems. This Wikipedia page, for example, lists all of the fonts that come bundled with Windows.\u00A0This is extremely limiting: A designer or developer cannot use anything other than those (usually fairly boring) fonts.\nNow that limitation is being overcome, thanks to web fonts.\u00A0These are essentially the typographic equivalent of music streaming services. Spotify removes\u00A0the need for\u00A0a\u00A0hard drive full of MP3s by transferring\u00A0audio directly over the Internet. Web fonts do the same for a hard drive full of fonts. Quartz, for example, uses\u00A0PT Serif\u00A0for its\u00A0body text. You probably don\u2019t have PT Serif installed on your computer or phone, but you\u00A0can\u00A0see it anyway. That\u2019s because your web browser downloads the font automatically.\n\nFont specimens for the Bold Italic variation of the PT Serif web font.Image:  Typekit\u201C[Web fonts] are a breath of fresh air,\u201D says Gerry Leonidas, a professor at Reading University in the UK who specializes in Greek typeface design. They allow designers to add new fonts to their pages at any time, and even to make frequent and subtle\u00A0changes to existing fonts, adds Leonidas.\u00A0And they are being used on a tremendous scale. Google, the largest provider of free web fonts, has delivered more than\u00A02 trillion downloads.\nThis will no doubt improve the online reading experience in\u00A0English, Spanish, or German. But it is almost revolutionary for non-Latin scripts, because system\u00A0fonts for them are often either non-existent or badly designed.\u00A0\u201CWeb fonts are way more important for non-Latin scripts than they are for Latin,\u201D says David\u00A0B\u0159ezina, the chief type officer at Rosetta Type, a firm that designs custom fonts to\u00A0cover\u00A0multiple scripts.\nRosetta has elegant web font offerings in such previously sidelined scripts as\u00A0Armenian\u00A0and\u00A0Inuktitut, a language spoken and read by Canadian Inuits. A student of Leonidas\u2019\u00A0developed the first\u00A0font\u00A0for the Native American language\u00A0Lushootseed;\u00A0converting this into a web font would be trivial.\n\nRosetta Type\u2019s font for the Inuktitut script.Image:  Rosetta TypeA\u00A0better Internet for emerging\u00A0markets\nWeb design has been improving steadily in Western countries, thanks to faster\u00A0connections, better browsers and more robust web development tools. Newer\u00A0sites like\u00A0Medium\u00A0and\u00A0Pinterest\u00A0look shockingly\u00A0better\u00A0than their\u00A0predecessors\u00A0(compare them to\u00A0Amazon, for example).\nThe state of web design in developing countries, on the other hand, has been mostly abysmal. Chinese websites are mostly\u00A0walls of tiny, barely legible text. The site of\u00A0Al-Ahram,\u00A0Egypt\u2019s largest daily newspaper, looks like it was designed in 1996. The same goes for the\u00A0online home\u00A0of the Indian state of Gujarat. But\u00A0as the number of Internet users in these countries grows alongside their economic prospects, they are demanding something better.\n\u201CFont design has not been highly\u00A0regarded in China,\u201D says\u00A0Curt Huang, president of Chinese font agency Changzhou Sinotype, a frequent collaborator with\u00A0Adobe. But, he says, \u201CChinese companies are increasingly concerned about fonts and design in general.\u201D And it\u2019s not just companies trying to improve their brand. Huang also cites growing interest in design from both individuals and even the government. Since 2005 the Central\u00A0Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing has offered a doctorate in typeface design, and Huang says the program is more popular than ever.\nGlobal organizations and firms, no matter where they\u2019re based,\u00A0ignore this demand for quality at their own peril. Leonidas emphasizes the competitive advantage\u00A0of having good typefaces for scripts like Devanagari, used by various\u00A0Indian languages and\u00A0read by between 400 million and 500 million people.\nMultinational\u00A0organizations are indeed responding. Voice of America adopted a Rosetta Type product\u00A0for its\u00A0Persian site. Google and Adobe have just released\u00A0their own Pan-Asian font\u00A0that covers Chinese, Japanese and Korean, which they\u00A0spent two-and-a-half years developing. Adobe has rolled the font\u00A0into its\u00A0Source Sansfamily, while Google has incorporated it\u00A0into its\u00A0ambitious\u00A0Noto\u00A0project, whose aim is to construct a single, solid base font for every script\u00A0on Earth.\n\u201CWe\u2019re trying to support all the languages and scripts encoded in the Unicode [character set] with as much harmony and consistency as possible, across scripts and as beautifully as possible,\u201D said Jungshik Shin, a Google software engineer who works on Noto, in an email to Quartz.\u00A0\u201CThis is a problem that\u2019s bigger than Google, but it\u2019s one that we see often as we support more and more users in their native language around the world.\u201D\n\nAn early draft of a character for Adobe and Google\u2019s Pan-Asian font.Image:  AdobeBoth Leonidas and\u00A0B\u0159ezina are\u00A0skeptical about whether\u00A0such a universal font can\u00A0be any good. \u201CIt is hardly ever the case that all the scripts in one family with more than three scripts are up to the same standard,\u201D said B\u0159ezina. Still, they say, raising the base standard for less common\u00A0scripts is a good idea. At the very least, it shows that Google, Adobe and the like want\u00A0to broadcast their messages more effectively to people across the globe.\nThe future language of the web\u00A0is not\u00A0just 'Globish'\nThere\u2019s another good reason to\u00A0combine different typefaces into a font, and you can see it if you\u00A0go\u00A0to\u00A0any news website in a language that doesn't use the Latin\u00A0alphabet.\u00A0Whether written in\u00A0Chinese,\u00A0Hindi or\u00A0Hebrew, nearly all of these\u00A0sites use the same writing system\u00A0as English sites for numbers, recognizable acronyms like NSA or IMF, and for words that have been adopted\u00A0from Western languages. And typically\u00A0they will use completely unrelated fonts.\n\u201COne might look too formal, or too informal,\u201D said Leonidas. \u201CIf I have a few words of Russian, do they disrupt\u00A0the flow on the page?\u201D The converse is true too. In\u00A0this excerpt from a\u00A0Haaretz\u00A0article,\u00A0the Latin letters\u00A0are not only too big and wide; their curves and angles are also jarringly different from those of the Hebrew letters:\n\nMulti-script excerpt from a Haaretz article on flight MH17.Image:  HaaretzIt\u2019s popular to claim that English is the\u00A0world\u2019s\u00A0de facto\u00A0lingua franca. But learning English\u00A0doesn't mean native speakers of other languages will be speaking it to one another. In fact,\u00A0Western languages, especially English,\u00A0are\u00A0creeping into other\u00A0scripts. Rosetta Type\u2019s Skolar, for example, was designed specifically as a multi-script font supporting\u00A0Latin, Cyrillic, Greek, Devanagari and Gujarati. The\u00A0same is true for Indian Type Foundry\u2019s\u00A0Akhand font, which has a similarly compact style for four Indic scripts:\u00A0Bengali, Devanagari, Malayalam and Tamil.\n\nIndian Type Foundry\u2019s Akhand font looks consistent across four Indic scripts.Image:  Indian Type Foundry\nRosetta Type\u2019s Skolar font with text in English and Gujarati.Image:  Rosetta TypeIt is no longer enough\u00A0for organizations like Google or\u00A0VOA to speak a\u00A0user\u2019s first language, but also her\u00A0second and third.\nThis isn't actually about fonts\nFonts are just a\u00A0good\u00A0proxy for changes\u00A0happening to the web. Giving people highly specialized content \u2014 whether it\u2019s a font, software update or search results \u2014 is now just a matter of changing a few settings. Emerging countries are hungry for a\u00A0better web experience. Companies that deliver one will be rewarded.\nBut the globalization of fonts does tell\u00A0us one thing: that a multilingual web is already\u00A0\u53F8\u7A7A\u898B\u6163."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://mashable.com/2014/07/29/web-fonts-globalization/>