Are you an OpenType?

Can OpenType be the multilingual font technology we've been waiting for?
. . . Maybe

For many years, multilingual publishing has been dogged by 'font issues'. For instance, a multilingual document that contained Greek, Russian, Polish, Romanian and Turkish would have needed 5 separate language fonts to display and print correctly.

In many cases it was difficult to find exact font matches across these languages because the language fonts themselves where often developed by different font manufacturers.

The OpenType format (the unlikely love child of Adobe and Microsoft) is designed to change all that. It is cross platform - so you can use the same font on a mac or a pc, it can contain many accents and alphabets - enough to cover every commercial language including Chinese and Japanese! It's also now widely available from font vendors.

So why hasn't it changed the world?
Part of the problem is they are not cheap. An OpenType font that contains accents for many languages will cost about four times that of a single language font. Many people who have paid once for their font collection are unwilling to fork out four times the original outlay just to get the same fonts they already have but with the added language support.

Another reason is that this new font standard isn't exactly a standard. While Abobe and Microsoft managed to agree on the OpenType format, they did not agree on everything, and so it would seem that not all OpenType fonts are created equal.

OpenType fonts are generally sold in two flavours, OpenType Standard and OpenType Pro. The standard version will typically have EU language support and some additional accents and ligatures. The Pro version has all that, plus it covers a range of non EU languages. Which sounds great. The problem is, no one agreed on what the additional languages would be.

This means that some OpenType Pro fonts will cover all EU, CE, Baltic, Cyrillic, Greek even Japanese and Chinese languages and some will only cover EU and CE. But they can both be called 'Pro' which means the term 'Pro' can only really indicate 'additional language support'.

We are therefore presented with the same issues we had before, albeit to a lesser extent. We are now able to produce multi-language documents using the unicode standard and a single font, which is fantastic, but people wishing to purchase OpenType fonts for language projects should proceed with caution and check with what languages are actually covered by the font before they purchase.