Google Fonts Blog: International Fonts Launch Today

Google Fonts Blog

News and updates from the Google Fonts team

International Fonts Launch Today

Tuesday, September 21, 2010

Today is a big day for the Google Font API. We have officially added our first non-Latin fonts to the Google Font API and Google Font Directory. Our additions include high quality web fonts for the Cyrillic, Greek, Hebrew, and Khmer scripts. That puts our total offering at 6 scripts, with over 25 unique font families and around 60 fonts in the Directory.

This launch marks a significant milestone for the web. We believe web fonts are critical not just for Latin-based scripts, but for all the world's languages. Fonts are a means of expression, and our choice of fonts freely available on the web should be large enough to allow for many different types of communication. In the coming months, the Google Font API team plans to expand our international coverage across even more scripts.

It's easy to take the variety of Latin web fonts for granted, but we have to remember that some scripts have no web fonts available at all. In these cases, users are required to download “font packs” to display the fonts correctly or they suffer from a poor web surfing experience:

A Khmer snippet properly displayed as a web font:

A Khmer snippet when the reader's computer does not have the correct font installed:

The creation of these web fonts is a labor intensive task that takes incredible patience, attention to detail, and skill. We'd like to thank all the immensely talented type designers that contributed to this launch, including Danh Hong, SIL International, the Greek Font Society, ParaType, and Jovanny Lemonad.
If you use a script that you would like to see supported by the Google Font API, please get in touch with our team through our moderator page. If you are a type designer with experience in designing for a script and you would like to contribute an original font family, we are actively soliciting commission proposals through this Proposal Form.