Question about roman characters in foreign font sets

Fonts and More General Font Discussions
1

Hello! I have a somewhat technical font question and from my google query “Font forum” this looked like my best bet. I’ve just begun to work with my university’s student run TV station.

I got an email from the graphics team leader with a supposedly all-encompassing list of the fonts available on the titling machine (provided below). I noticed quickly that most of these are foreign fonts- arabic, thai, han. Only a few were roman character fonts. I responded telling her that most of those fonts aren’t actually fit for our use, and was surprised at the discussion over which fonts people like more, Simplified Arabic or David.

It seems to me that typing English sentences under one of these fonts will result in the use of a generic font, since trying that out in many of these got me thin, non-smoothed, ugly fonts. I was confused though, by the fact that they all did look slightly different, and that the Arabic fonts, in word, didn’t work (trying to format normal text as Arabic just reverted back to the default Word font).

Could someone explain exactly whether or not these fonts contain English character sets, and whether or not they’re actually improper to use for English writing? I tried to do some research of my own but didn’t find anything besides endless websites advertising foreign font downloads without explanation of their inner-workings.

This is the list:
Cordia New, Cordia UPC, DilleniaUPC, Dotum, Dotum Che, EucrosiaUPC, FressiaUPC, Gulim, Gulim Che, Gungsuh, GungsuhChe, IrisUPC, JasmineUPC, KodchiangUPC, LilyUPC, MS Gothic, MS Mincho, MS PGothic, MS PMincho, MS UI Gothic, Microsoft Sans Serif, MingLiU, NSimSun, P Ming Liu, SimHei, SimSun, Simplified arabic, Simplified Arabic Fixed, Tahoma, Traditional Arabic, Verdana

2

There is no harm asking here — we have a few members who know about Arabic fonts — but you might have more luck posting on the Typophile Forums:

Arabic Typography & Type Design

3

The Titling Machine is possibly aimed at the Asian market so they may load it with many specialized fonts. The few I looked at were common fonts from mainstream foundries. Easiest answer would be to try them all and find the ones which you like and which work. At best you were given a set of fonts which should work on the Titling Machine, if not MS Word.

4

I ended up posting my question on Typophile and got a pretty good answer. Foreign fonts aren’t required to include Latin characters, but it is Microsoft’s policy to always do so (for compatibility). All of the fonts I had listed were MS fonts. The latin characters included in foreign fonts are almost always copies of generic typefaces, but are less inclusive, and sometimes are squashed to be more concordant visually with the foreign characters they accompany. I forwarded this information on to the graphics team leader, but unfortunately her response was along the lines of “The ones we use are legible and different from each other so why waste time picking better fonts?”

5

Surprising response. A philistine as graphics team leader!