Language & Writing System Font Guide
Comprehensive guides for serving fonts across the world's writing systems. Learn to optimize CJK fonts, handle RTL scripts, render Indic text correctly, and build robust multilingual font stacks that work everywhere.
Why Language-Specific Font Support Matters
Over 60% of internet users read content in non-Latin scripts. Chinese, Arabic, Devanagari, and other writing systems each have unique typographic requirements that generic font setups fail to address. Proper language-specific font configuration ensures readable text, fast loading, and correct rendering for every visitor regardless of their language.
Multilingual Font Setup
Configure unicode-range, :lang() selectors, and per-language font stacks for sites serving multiple writing systems.
Right-to-Left (RTL) Fonts
Arabic and Hebrew font considerations including bidirectional text, contextual shaping, and CSS logical properties.
CJK Font Optimization
Optimize Chinese, Japanese, and Korean web fonts from 20MB to under 500KB with subsetting and unicode-range splitting.
Emoji & Symbol Font Support
Cross-platform emoji rendering, color font formats (COLR, CBDT, SVG), and consistent emoji display strategies.
Indic Script Fonts
Complex script rendering for Devanagari, Tamil, Bengali, and other Indic scripts with proper OpenType shaping.
Font Fallback Chains
Build robust font-family stacks with metric-matched fallbacks to eliminate layout shift and cover all scripts.
Latin Extended Support
Ensure proper rendering of diacritical marks, accented characters, and special glyphs for European and Vietnamese text.
Quick Language Support Reference
Script Complexity Levels
- • Latin: Simple left-to-right
- • Arabic/Hebrew: RTL + contextual shaping
- • CJK: Large glyph sets (20K-80K)
- • Indic: Complex shaping + reordering
Key CSS Properties
- •
unicode-range— load fonts on demand - •
direction— RTL text flow - •
writing-mode— vertical text - •
font-display— loading behavior
Optimization Quick Tips
- • Subset aggressively for each script
- • Split CJK into unicode-range slices
- • Load non-Latin fonts on demand
- • Use WOFF2 for best compression
Related Tools
Font Subsetter
Subset fonts to include only the characters your content needs. Essential for CJK, Arabic, and Indic font optimization.
Try the tool →Unicode Range Generator
Generate CSS unicode-range values for any writing system. Automatically create @font-face rules for multilingual font loading.
Try the tool →
Written & Verified by
Sarah Mitchell
Product Designer, Font Specialist
Support Every Writing System
Optimize your fonts for any language with our free subsetting and unicode-range tools. Serve fast, beautiful typography to every user worldwide.