Fonts for obscure scripts/languages?

Font Book is not the right place. Go to the expanded version of Character Viewer, add Unicode to list on the left, and go to the ranges of those scripts and select a character. Over at the bottom right you should see a Font Variation pane. Select one and it will show you the name of the font.

MacOS cannot display characters that are not in some installed font, except on a web page where web fonts are being used.

The best way to ensure everyone can see unusual stuff like yours is to use web fonts. I think Google offers this.

The website sends (usually) UTF-8 encoded Unicode glyphs, and the web browser then uses the local fonts to render the characters.

Different browsers and platforms and different installs have different fonts present, and different fonts selected.

No font has all characters, nor can a font have all characters. Fonts using common formats such as TrueType can’t get that big.

You’re likely going to have to test in Firefox, Chrome and Edge on your target platforms; probably Windows 11 and probably 10, recent Android, and maybe Linux. if you want to test yourself, Microsoft has free Windows installs for browser testing, which can be loaded as guests in various Mac hypervisors.

…Or you’ll have to provide a font which gets downloaded with your webpage, if the common platforms lack what you need.

There are services around which can check this too (and BrowserStack was one such), though these services tend not to be free.

Or the users get to test for you and provide feedback, of course.

There are testing tools and documentation around.

https://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/utf8test.htm

https://github.com/bits/UTF-8-Unicode-Test-Documents

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Multilingual_support_%28East_Asian%29

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode_font (one of the tables here lists fonts with coverage for some of the ranges you’re interested in.)

sflinc wrote:

MacOS does display characters that are not in any regular installed font, even when I’m not on a web page of any kind. The clearest example of this is Adlam (Unicode U+1E900).

Character Viewer has gotten buggy in that area, plus Apple has started failing to show some installed fonts in menus, etc. If you input some Adlam into TextEdit and select it, it should show it is using the Noto Sans Adlam font, which is no doubt installed somewhere. See

Fonts included with macOS Monterey - Apple Support

MrHoffman wrote:…Or you’ll have to provide a font which gets downloaded with your webpage,

Yes, web fonts are really the best way to solve this problem.

PS To have the "invisible" installed fonts show up, in Font Book go to File > Add Fonts, then navigate to System/Library/Fonts/Supplemental, select and Open the ones you want.

If the Unicode glyph is rendering, there is a font involved. Somewhere.

For Adlam, likely: Noto Sans Adlam Regular Version 3.000

Fonts included with macOS Monterey - Apple Support

With Character Viewer, you have to add the supplementary fonts in Font Book for them to then show up in the lower-right font box in Character Viewer. Character Viewer is smart enough to find the code point without that, but not smart enough to tell you from whence the code point came. If you use Font Book to add the supplementary fonts of interest (NotoSansAdlam), then the code points will show up in Character Viewer when searching for, for instance, U+1E900.

Above is from Monterey macOS 12.4 current.

Noto Sans is already installed on macOS. Sometimes it drives people into a rage when they see those fonts in some 3rd party app that doesn't properly handle document support fonts.

I think you may be overthinking this. Just do the web page and then see how it looks on all of your supported platforms. Anyone who is interested in these scripts probably has a font that can display it.

sflinc wrote: I am currently working on a web project that has text in a large number of languages, several of which use relatively obscure scripts (alphabets).

When you have this up, come back and provide the url, as I would be interested in seeing it. One of my hobbies is making input keyboards for obscure stuff where Apple has not yet done so.

Tom Gewecke wrote:

PS To have the "invisible" installed fonts show up, in Font Book go to File > Add Fonts, then navigate to System/Library/Fonts/Supplemental, select and Open the ones you want.

Another (and massive hack) way to implement this requirement is to display the required text in an image. Can't see the text rendered in fonts? Well, here's an image to go with your crayon-grade platform. And to see the next image, hold your browser upside down and shake it to clear the display. 🤣

PS Here is some info on using Noto fonts as web fonts:

https://fonts.google.com/noto/use#use-noto-fonts-as-web-fonts

I think you need to get out more. 8^)