Language Collection and Fonts in Windows XP

	On this page Fonts in "Basic" Language Collection Fonts in "Complex Script" Language Collection Fonts in "East Asia" Language Collection Related Links Windows XP Language Collections Windows 2000 Language Groups Microsoft Typography Code Pages

Fonts, language collections and language groups

Before we start getting into the detailed lists of fonts per language collection and what characters each font is able to display, we first should go over the terminology used when talking about fonts. Let's start off with the font. A font-file contains a collection of glyph images, graphical representations for code points. If you wonder why I didn't use the word "character", the reason is that a code point may not only represent a single character like in the latin alphabets but may represent the shape for combined characters, syllables, whole words or even abstract ideas (e.g. a telephone image) depending on the script it is used in. The content of a font-file usually also references one or more coded character sets or code pages. Thus, a font-file may be able to display glyph images for different scripts.

In Windows 2000, language groups were used to add input and display support for different alphabets. Since alphabets are often shared between several languages they had been called language groups. As an example the language group Western Europe & US is based on the Latin alphabet and used by languages such as English, French, Spanish, German and others. For a complete list of language groups please see Windows 2000 - List of Locale IDs and Language Groups

Since Windows XP that schema was consolidated into the three language collections: Basic, Complex Script and East Asia. The Basic language group supports languages based on Latin, Cyrillic & Greek alphabets and contains also the locale information for most countries/regions in Europe and the Americas. The Complex Script language collection supports Arabic, Georgian, Hebrew, Indian, Thai and Vietnamese alphabets and also adds support for complex scripting such as combined characters and bi-directional writing. Finally, the East Asia language group supports East Asian scripts and also adds support for the Input Method Editors used to enter text in these languages. For a more detailed description of the language support please see Windows XP/Server 2003 - List of Locale IDs, Input Locale, and Language Collection

The following pages list what fonts get installed with the individual Windows XP language collection and also displays information about the selected font, including its Windows display name, font file name and the list of supported Unicode ranges and code pages for this font.

• "Basic" language collection fonts
• "Complex Script" language collection fonts
• "East Asia" language collection fonts