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I'm building a webpage that has to use custom fonts (Ubuntu, specifically). Unfortunately, the website also needs to be multilingual, and additional languages will be added later by the administrator. It's a requirement that additional languages can be added with a click of a button.

Thus the fonts need to be fairly large in order to accommodate all potential characters. Even in WOFF, that results in about 500KB of fonts alone. Which sucks.

On the other hand, if I look at it realistically, the most probable languages will be Latvian, English, Russian, German, Estonian, Lithuanian. Maybe French, if they decide to go all the way. Which means that anything outside Latin + Cyrillic is very unlikely. That could severely reduce the font size.

Still, I'd like to be ready for any eventuality. Is it possible to somehow "split" the font into two parts - "basic" and "extended", and then load them separately? So that Latin/Cyrillic languages load quickly, but the rest only load later, if ever?

Oh, this also needs to work on IE7 and IE8. :P

Vilx-
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1 Answers1

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You can create several fonts which only contains support for some languages with FontForge, a free and open-source tool (how-to here), or by using FontSquirrel’s Generator — just make sure you pick a subset of characters like Latin or Cyrillic:

fontsquirrel

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fitojb
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  • I know, and I tried that tool. Unfortunately it hopelessly messes up the font. I don't know what information it discards (probably hints), but it looks awful afterwards. – Vilx- Nov 30 '12 at 13:45