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Standardised Language Script Suffixes

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Screen Shot 2019 04 18 at 11.52.06

Typotheque transitioned from the old 8-bit PostScript Type 1 fonts to OpenType sometime in 2003. Going from the old Type 1 fonts, (which were limited to a maximum of 256 glyphs) to OpenType fonts (which support up to 65,535 glyphs) was a big change, to say the least. In the old days, font names carried suffixes — CE for Central European, TR for Turkish, Baltic for Baltic languages, etc., since no single font file could contain all the characters required by multiple language families. With the advent of OpenType, we could extend the language support beyond Western European languages, and following the example of Adobe (who co-wrote the OpenType specs), we started the using Std (Standard) and Pro suffixes. In this scheme, ‘Std’ fonts supported Latin-based languages, while ‘Pro’ fonts supported Latin plus Cyrillic and Greek, but many users were left with the impression that only the ‘Pro’ fonts had advanced typographic features such as optional ligatures, small caps and alternate numeral styles, and we spent countless hours reassuring customers that the ‘Std’ fonts were just as good as the ‘Pro’ fonts, if you only needed Latin text.

As of today, we are retiring the arbitrary Std/Pro names, replacing them with language tags for various writing scripts. For example, Fedra Sans Std will become Fedra Sans L to indicates that it covers all Latin-based European languages. Fedra Sans Pro will become Fedra Sans LCG, since it supports the Latin, Cyrillic and Greek scripts. Similarly, when you see Fedra Sans DL or Fedra Sans HL, you’ll know that you can use them for Devanagari and Latin, or Hebrew and Latin, respectively.

Typotheque strives to support many writing scripts, so you will find a great many suffixes in our catalog to help you find fonts for the languages that you need to use. We’d like to enourage fellow type designers to adopt this font naming conventions.

  • L Latin
  • G Greek
  • C Cyrillic
  • A Arabic
  • H Hebrew
  • Am Armenian
  • Ge Georgian
  • Gg Glagolitic
  • Sy Canadian Syllabics
  • Tf Tifinagh
  • E Ethiopic
  • Ch Cherokee
  • D Devanagari
  • T Tamil
  • B Bangla
  • Gu Gujarati
  • Ml Malayalam
  • Te Telugu
  • Kn Kannada
  • Gm Gurmukhi
  • O Odia
  • Mt Meetei Mayek
  • Si Sinhala
  • Th Thai
  • Lo Lao
  • Km Khmer
  • My Myanmar
  • Jv Javanese
  • Mn Mongolian
  • Ti Tibetan
  • Z Chinese (Zhōngwén)
  • J Japanese
  • K Korean