Accessible everywhere

The current release of Zed supports 547 languages, paying particular attention to the Indigenous languages that use the Roman alphabet, such as the orthographies of North American and African languages, but also supporting Armenian, Cyrillic, Chinese, Georgian, Greek, Hebrew, Japanese and Korean writing scripts.

During our research and work with the Indigenous communities in British Columbia, we noticed that some characters required by the Wakashan and Salishan languages were missing, so we drafted a proposal to encode these characters into the Unicode text encoding standard, to facilitate an accurate and complete representation of these languages. Our proposal was accepted for inclusion in Unicode 16.0, and Zed is the first font to include the new characters. However, the updated standard allows anyone to represent these characters in other fonts too.

Of course, the world is diverse, as is the use of writing scripts, and so we are currently working with designers and communities worldwide on further language extensions to support Arabic, Bangla, Canadian Syllabics, Cherokee, Devanagari, Gujarati, Gurmukhi, Kannada, Khmer, Lao, Malayalam, Meetei, Odia, Ol Chiki, Sinhala, Tamil, Telugu, and Thai. This makes Zed a truly accessible typeface and demonstrates Typotheque’s commitment to cultural diversity.