Hyperglot—automating detection of language support in fonts
Hyperglot is an open research project dedicated to documenting how the world’s languages are written. As contemporary fonts are designed to support many languages at once, it is increasingly difficult for designers to keep up with changing linguistic requirements and for users to determine whether a particular font supports a given language. Hyperglot responds to this challenge by providing reliable data on orthographies their character sets, as well as their design and shaping requirements. In doing so, it contributes to improved language support in digital typography, particularly for languages that have historically received limited attention. Hyperglot was launched in 2020 and currently covers 782 languages and is developed as open source by Rosetta Type/Research in collaboration with a global community of contributors. The project has grown over the years. Initially, it was merely checking whether characters from language orthographies are properly encoded in the font using the Unicode code points. Later on, an optional analysis of fonts’ OpenType tables was added to check whether there is support for script shaping in the font. Great attention has been given to the development of accompanying web apps in order to present the data in a way that is helpful for the font users and designers. Being mindful of the necessary decisions users need to make, Hyperglot avoids a strong authoritative approach and minimises the risk of falsely reporting a font that does not support a language (false negatives). At the end of the presentation, the audience should know how Hyperglot is organised, what were the key motivations behind its structure, command-line tools, and web app interfaces, and how it relates to other tools (CLDR, SLDR).