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This question is similar to How to know which of my fonts do or don't support certain glyphs?, but for fonts in font shops, not just fonts I already have.

I need to make a design which includes two relatively rare international characters - ɔ and ɛ:

enter image description here

The vast majority of fonts don't support these characters. Arial does, and Arial Bold, but that's all I've found so far.

What I'd like to do, is find some font store or similar that lets me input the characters I need, and filters out fonts that don't include those characters, leaving me able to browse, choose between and hopefully buy from the few that do.

Does any such service or tool exist?

The above linked question has an answer suggesting going to https://www.myfonts.com/languages/ and choosing the appropriate language. Unfortunately, their languages list is, as they put it, a...

Work in progress

We realize this page is very sparse at the moment. We’re working on it!

...and the 15 options don't match my needs (those two characters are from Sierra Leoneon Krio, it'll be a while before that's added to their list!). So I really do need to search by character, not language.

That said, browsing their "IPA/Phonetic" fonts did turn up an amazing 13 fonts matching my characters, out of 43 (I guess if a font covers IPA, it might well cover everything). It's better than anything else I've tried, but it's not the filter I'm looking for.

It also suggests putting in the text as sample text then scrolling down until something can handle it. This helped with something like the IPA filter but for any other results set, I was literally scrolling past hundreds and hundreds before finding a single match.

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    These two should appear in all IPA fonts as these are well-established phonetic characters, but (1) IPA does not define capitals, and (2) common use characters appear outside the IPA range - and then usually in combination with a capital alternative. If on Windows, check your set of C-fonts, as they are amazingly up to date.
    – Jongware
    Commented Nov 16, 2015 at 18:37
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    @Jongware’s point is an important one: both these characters are exceedingly common in phonetic writing (they represent the o sound in thought [as said in the Northwest of the US] and the e sound in let), but if you need to use them for something like writing in Kabiyè, you'll need capital Ɔ and Ɛ as well (plus quite a few more), since those are part of the standard Kabiyè orthography.
    – Janus Bahs Jacquet
    Commented Nov 16, 2015 at 21:51
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    (Just checked: these Windows standard fonts contain Ɔ Ɛ ɔ ɛ: Times New Roman, Arial, Courier (!), Tahoma, Segoe UI, as well as some of the C-fonts I referred to: Calibri, Consolas, and Cambria.)
    – Jongware
    Commented Nov 17, 2015 at 11:06
  • @Jongware Ah, I didn't know that was what you meant by "C-fonts". If you put that list as an additional answer it'll definitely deserve an upvote or two.
    – user56reinstatemonica8
    Commented Nov 17, 2015 at 11:33
  • Nah – I briefly considered doing so but even though I have a couple of solutions (frequently necessary as I work with lots of texts on linguistics), they all are exclusively for "local" fonts, and would not work to search on external sites.
    – Jongware
    Commented Nov 17, 2015 at 11:36

5 Answers 5

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myfonts.com does indeed provide one solution. In the advanced search form, select “available characters” from the field to search, “contains,” and type your character in the search box. Be sure to check the results by looking at the table of glyphs in each font, because I haven’t found the results absolutely reliable, but they do give you a start.

Where is the advanced search form? As on many sites, it shows up only after you do an ordinary search. Silly design, in my opinion, but there it is.

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  • Brilliant! About half the results contain my character, which is the best yet - don't know why some results don't but this seems to be a way to see every don't that matches (or at least, most)
    – user56reinstatemonica8
    Commented Nov 16, 2015 at 20:51
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    This doesn't seem to work anymore, unfortunately. I couldn't find the advanced search after doing an ordinary search. Under myfonts.com/search there are filters, but they don't seemm to include "available characters".
    – joriki
    Commented May 19, 2021 at 7:16
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    @joriki Yes, lots of useful features on the site have vanished. It seems that, in its efforts to make the site easier to browse on phones, Monotype has impoverished the experience on desktops. I’ve complained; join the chorus, and perhaps Monotype will pay attention?
    – Thérèse
    Commented May 19, 2021 at 13:00
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    Once again we see that mobile sucks.
    – Atario
    Commented Feb 16, 2022 at 1:56
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The website fontspace.com

The website fontspace.com seems to have this feature, when combined with google. For example, let's say you want to find fonts that have the musical character 𝄇

(Hopefully as you're reading this, your system fonts can display the example character)

  1. Open Google and search for site:fontspace.com 𝄇
  2. Click on the first result entitled musical symbol right repeat sign u+1d107 - FontSpace
  3. Scroll down the page to see a list of fonts that contain this Unicode character: Screenshot
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  • Wow, what a great site! For my test character, it returned over 200 fonts, compared to about 10 from FileFormat.info. Thank you very much!
    – Jens Bannmann
    Commented Jun 10, 2022 at 20:36
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Meanwhile, myfonts.com seems to have stopped offering the "available characters" search option.

However, FileFormat.Info has a solution:

  1. Navigate to https://www.fileformat.info/.

  2. Paste the character in the search bar. Alternatively, enter its unicode name or code point.

  3. Submit the form and navigate to the character reference page listed in the search results:

  4. Click the link to the right of the character rendering labelled "Fonts that support U+...". On the subsequent page, you'll find a table of font names and links to a preview rendering that looks like this:

    Table

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  • Amazing! Thank you.
    – Flimm
    Commented Jun 9, 2022 at 10:49
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I needed the same characters (for Sierra Leonean Krio and Themne, in fact!). Here is what I ended up with after a fair bit of research.

Noto https://www.google.com/get/noto/

Gentium plus https://software.sil.org/gentium/

Junicode https://junicode.sourceforge.io/

It's frustrating that some fonts include the characters I need but just appear to use a duplicate of the Arial character. This can look really bad... character styling is not always consistent.

The ones that I linked to above, do seem to have consistent styling, atleast from what I've seen so far. I worked through this partially using the following resource: https://r12a.github.io/scripts/fontlist/?script=latn&text=%C3%A1%20%C3%A3%20%C3%A9%20%C3%AD%20%C3%B3%20%C3%B5%20%C3%BA%20%C3%81%20%C3%83%20%C3%89%20%C3%8D%20%C3%93%20%C3%95%20%C3%9A%20%C6%81%20%C6%8A%20%C6%90%20%C6%86%20%C4%A9%20%C5%8B%20%C5%A9%20%C4%A8%20%C5%8A%20%C5%A8%20%E1%BA%BD%20%E1%BA%BC%20%C9%93%20%C9%97%20%C9%9B%20%C9%94%20%CC%81%20%CC%83#result

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Noto Sans aims to cover all of Unicode Characters. Not there yet, but seems to have both that you're looking for.

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    OP was not looking for a single particular font, but for a way to find "fonts in font shops".
    – Jongware
    Commented Nov 17, 2015 at 11:07
  • True, this does not address the question directly, but I thought it might be useful, not only to the OP, but to others looking for a font that will, at least at some point, support all encoded characters.
    – spiral
    Commented Nov 17, 2015 at 12:17
  • Post a comment then. This is not an answer.
    – Vun-Hugh Vaw
    Commented May 31, 2022 at 11:21

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