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Powys County Council
Participant
October 5, 2020
Question

Welsh Language option.

  • October 5, 2020
  • 1 reply
  • 677 views

Are there and plans to add Welsh to the list of languages when searching in browse fonts.?

 

      1 reply

      T
      Test Screen Name
      Legend
      October 5, 2020

      So far as I know the 29 letters of modern Welsh are made entirely by combining Latin 1 characters, so you could choose  Catalan, English or others to find suitable fonts. Details follow:

       

      (This is not an Adobe reply but a personal opinion; I do not work for Adobe). It's a pity Adobe chose to use the word "language" to simplify searching, because it is not actually searching for a language, and not presenting a result in a different language, and is not a term used in font classification. Instead, it is searching for a font suitable for showing a language - really, you might say it's searching for an "alphabet". Sometimes "language" and "alphabet" go together, like Japanese. However, almost all the western european languages that I know use the same Latin alphabet, with accented characters found in almost all Western fonts. So choosing "Spanish", "English", "Portugese" or "Catalan" should give the same answer (and I don't know why it does not!) - "Latin 1" is the correct term for all western European fonts, or more formally "ISO/IEC 8859-1" - I suppose I can see why the font browser does not offer ISO/IEC numbers. The term "language" here, while superficially simple, risks being confusing or not inclusive, and could perhaps be improved.  

      Latin 2 is similar to Latin 1 but has different accents as found in Eastern europe. https://jakubmarian.com/alphabets-of-europe/

      (Would welcome an Adobe reply on whether you feel the term "language", not an official font classification term, has problems with inclusivity!)

      P
      Powys County CouncilAuthor
      Participant
      October 13, 2020

      The welsh alphabet is covererd by characters in the Latin alphabet, but Welsh also uses accents on some characters that are not usually supported. ... Most commonly the ŵ and ŷ

      T
      Test Screen Name
      Legend
      October 13, 2020

      Thank you for the update. I didn't know this. A bit of research led me into the discovery (not news to you, I'm sure, but perhaps to other people reading this), that ŵ and ŷ, as well as their upper case mappings, are not part of the Western European character set nor the Eastern, but are part of ISO/IEC 8859-14, covering at least 6 Celtic languages, including Welsh and Irish. Given this, I'd agree completely that a way to filter for this is very desirable (though my reservations about using "Language" as the category remain).

       

      The only way I could find to check if the fonts on Adobe Fonts are suitable for Welsh, before installing, is to go to the font's page and add these characters to the sample text. There seems fairly good coverage; it may be that the software used to make fonts today automatically generates whatever characters it can by combining accents and letters already in the font. But nobody should have to guess!

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