WGL Character Set

Microsoft has defined a pan-European character set known as WGL (Windows Glyph List). It contains approximately 652 characters that are required for Western, Central and Eastern European languages.

For a complete WGL character chart in PDF format, click here.

WGL fonts are Unicode encoded, and incorporate the following code pages:

1252 Latin 1 - Languages include Afrikaans, Basque, Catalan, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Icelandic, Indonesian, Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish. (click here for a Latin-1 character set chart)
1250 Latin 2 Eastern Europe - Languages include Albanian, Croatian, Czech, Hungarian, Polish, Romanian, Slovak, Slovenian.
1251 Cyrillic - Languages include Belarusian, Bulgarian, Macedonian, Russian, Serbian, Ukrainian.
1253 Greek
1254 Turkish
1257 Baltic - Languages include Estonian, Latvian, Lithuanian.

Many of Microsoft's core fonts for Windows and the web support WGL, and they have become popular with multi-national companies as well as software and hardware developers who do business in the European Community. WGL fonts make it easier to create and share multilingual documents.

For a list of Microsoft fonts available in WGL click here.

Ascender is noted for its expertise to extend an existing font to support the WGL character set. For more information on Ascender's custom font services, click here.

WGL provides support for the following languages:

Afrikaans	Finnish	Polish
Albanian	French	Portuguese
Basque	German	Romanian
Bulgarian	Greek	Russian
Belarusian	Hungarian	Serbian
Catalan	Icelandic	Slovak
Croatian	Indonesian	Slovenian
Czech	Italian	Spanish
Danish	Latvian	Swedish
Dutch	Lithuanian	Turkish
English	Macedonian	Ukrainian
Estonian	Norwegian

Identifying WGL fonts in Windows

The Microsoft Font properties extension is a great addition to Windows that allows you to see a font's character set. You can download a free copy of this software from here.

After you have installed the Font properties extension, simply right-click on a font and it brings up an extended Font properties screen. Selecting the CharSet/Unicode tab will show the character set features.

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Using WGL fonts in Windows XP or Mac OS X

Windows XP and Mac OS X includes text services that allow you to enter and edit text in a document.

You define a default language and keyboard layout when you install Windows XP, but you can add additional text services from Control Panel/Regional and Language Options.

If you select a keyboard layouts from one of the languages in a WGL font, this will provide you with the ability to easily type in text in the desired language. Keyboards are generally language-specific, and some languages provide multiple keyboard layout options. Note: each text service requires computer memory and can affect performance, so only add the languages you need.

Please go to our Font Help section for more information on text services and keyboard layouts in Windows XP and Mac OS X.

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For more information on licensing the Microsoft fonts or on WGL fonts, please contact us.

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