Typing English with Linguist's Software Fonts

Linguist's Software produces both Unicode encoded and non-Unicode- (custom-) encoded fonts. The Unicode-encoded fonts include the complete Latin 1 character set, providing English and west European languages. These fonts (and their keyboard drivers) work only in Unicode-aware versions of Windows and Macintosh OS X, and only with Unicode-aware applications.

Many of our non-Unicode-encoded fonts for both Windows and the Macintosh provide the Latin letters needed to type the English language, but before you purchase one of our fonts specifically for the purpose of typing English, you should understand the following. While you can type English with many of our non-Unicode-encoded fonts, none of them provide complete compatibility with standard Windows and Macintosh Latin fonts. Standard Windows fonts (called code page 1252, ANSI, or Latin 1 fonts) and standard Macintosh fonts (called Macintosh Roman, MacRoman, or code page 10000) contain the Latin alphabet and standard punctuation in the first part of the font. This is called ASCII, which means American Standard Code for Information Interchange. Standard Windows and Macintosh fonts are completely compatible with each other at this level.

The other half of standard Windows and Macintosh fonts (sometimes, but incorrectly called extended ASCII) contains accented Latin letters and other symbols used in west European and other languages. Standard Windows and Macintosh fonts are compatible with each other in most of the accented letters, but not all of them, and do not correspond with each other in many of the other symbols. Nevertheless, files including most west European languages are cross-platform compatible.

Many Linguist's Software non-Unicode-encoded fonts follow the ASCII standard for the first part of the font but then contain the localized script or alphabet that the font is intended to cover in the extended part of the font. These fonts may be used for English, including punctuation, since they follow ASCII, and are cross-platform compatible for English. These fonts will also be compatible with standard Windows and Macintosh fonts for the purpose of typing English, including punctuation. This means that files containing English typed in Times New Roman, Helvetica, and other standard Latin fonts, may be changed to this category of Linguist's Software fonts with no conversion or search and replace operations necessary.

Other Linguist's Software non-Unicode-encoded fonts contain the English alphabet in their standard ASCII positions, but have the punctuation characters that are in the font in different positions from standard ASCII. The normal punctuation positions are filled with letters, accents and other diacritics needed by the language the font is primarily designed to type. Therefore, these fonts are able to type English, and the English portion will be compatible with standard Windows and Macintosh fonts, but the user must be careful about converting punctuation from standard fonts.

Our non-Unicode-encoded Biblical and classical Greek fonts contain the English alphabet, but in positions different from the ASCII standard. Users may type English with these fonts but will not be able to convert the English to/from standard Windows and Macintosh fonts (without a lot of search and replace operations).

The Linguist's Software non-Unicode-encoded font that is the closest to a standard Windows and Macintosh font is LaserTurkish, which differs from standard Windows and Macintosh fonts in only six characters. You therefore can type English and most west European languages, including punctuation, in our LaserTurkish font and retain compatibility with standard fonts. A good alternative to LaserTurkish for some is LaserMacron, which conforms to standard fonts with the exception of ten characters in the extended part of the font which have been changed to macron-vowel combinations. The user will thus be able to type and convert to/from standard fonts all English, but fewer non-English languages than with LaserTurkish. Finally, TransRoman and TransSlavic are good for typing English and both west and east European languages. However, only the English alphabet portion of these fonts is compatible with standard Windows and Macintosh fonts. The punctuation and the accented letters and other diacritics used in west and east European languages will not correctly convert to/from standard Windows and Macintosh fonts.

Finally, the Unicode-encoded fonts we produce work only in modern versions of Windows that support Unicode and in Macintosh OS X, and only with applications that support Unicode. You should carefully read the individual product pages for the Unicode-encoded fonts to be sure your Operating System and applications will support the font, since our different Unicode-encoded products have different requirements.

The following table will help you in picking a font for typing English.