WGL Pan-European Character Set

Microsoft has defined a pan-European character set known as WGL (Windows Glyph List). It contains approximately 652 characters that are required for Western, Central and Eastern European languages.

View a WGL character chart in PDF format. PDF

WGL fonts are Unicode encoded, and incorporate the following code pages:

  • Latin 1 (codepage 1252) - Languages include Afrikaans, Alsatian, Basque, Bislama, Breton, Catalan, Chamorro, Danish, Dutch, English, Faroese, Finnish, Flemish, Franco-Provençal, French, Frisian, Friulian, Galician, German, Greenlandic, Icelandic, Indonesian, Irish, Italian, Ladin, Latin, Luxembourgish, Malay, Manx Gaelic, Norwegian (Bokmål), Norwegian (Nynorsk), Occitan, Portuguese, Rhaeto-Romance, Romansh, Sami (Inari), Sami (Lule), Sami (Northern), Sami (Skolt), Sami (Southern), Scottish Gaelic, Spanish, Swahili, Swedish, Tagalog, Walloon and Welsh. (view a Latin-1 character set chart)
  • Latin 2 Eastern Europe (codepage 1250) - Languages include Albanian, Bosnian (Latin), Croatian, Czech, Hungarian, Polish, Romanian, Slovak, Slovenian and Sorbian.
  • Cyrillic (codepage 1251) - Languages include Azeri (Cyrillic), Belarusian (Belorussian), Bosnian (Cyrillic), Bulgarian, Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Macedonian (FYROM), Moldovian, Mongolian, Russian, Serbian, Tatar, Ukrainian and Uzbek (Cyrillic).
  • Greek (codepage 1253) - Greek (Modern)
  • Turkish (codepage 1254) - Languages include Azeri (Latin), Kurdish (Latin), Turkish and Uzbek (Latin).
  • Baltic (codepage 1257) - Languages include Estonian, Latvian and Lithuanian.

> View a chart with all the languages supported in WGL

Many of Microsoft's core fonts for Windows and the web support WGL, and they have become popular with multi-national companies as well as software and hardware developers who do business in the European Community. WGL fonts make it easier to create and share multilingual documents.

View a list of WGL fonts available from Ascender.

Ascender is noted for its expertise to extend an existing font to support the WGL character set. For more information on Ascender's custom font services, click here.

 

 

Identifying WGL fonts in Windows

The Microsoft Font Properties Extension is a great addition to Windows that allows you to see a font's character set.  Download a free copy of Microsoft Font Properties Extension.

After you have installed the Font properties extension, simply right-click on a font and it brings up an extended Font properties screen. Selecting the CharSet/Unicode tab will show the character set features.

 

Using WGL fonts in Windows or Mac OS X

Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7 and Mac OS X includes text services that allow you to enter and edit text in a document.

You define a default language and keyboard layout when you install Windows, but you can add additional text services from Control Panel/Regional and Language Options.

If you select a keyboard layouts from one of the languages in a WGL font, this will provide you with the ability to easily type in text in the desired language. Keyboards are generally language-specific, and some languages provide multiple keyboard layout options. Note: each text service requires computer memory and can affect performance, so only add the languages you need.

Please go to our Font Help section for more information on text services and keyboard layouts in Windows XP, Windows Vista and Mac OS X.

 

For more information on licensing the Microsoft fonts or on WGL Pan-European fonts, please contact us.