What controls the Languages in the OTF output?

1

This seems like it’s a dumb newbie question. I made a fairly simple latin alphabet font that’s all-caps with just a handful of punctuation. (The lower case unicode codes exist but are mapped to the uppercase glyphs.)

When I export to OTF and look at font info with Font Book, I see a Language field that looks like this:

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This is a sort of unexpected grab bag of languages. Obviously this font can be used (imperfectly I suppose) in other Latin-letter languages. Can someone help me understand

  1. What the Language field in the font is used for in the OS it’s installed in? Ie, what is its significance anyway?

  2. Why did my font get this set of languages assigned to it? Is this a choice I made somewhere that I should do differently? Or is this based on character set? Or what?

Thanks

2

Only Apple knows for sure. But as far as I can tell, it scans for the presence of certain Unicodes in the font. If all a certain set of characters is supported, the respective language will be listed.

Update: I have a suspicion that it has to do with the charset of the keyboard layouts of the same language. See System Preferences > Keyboard > Input Sources.

3

Ahhh I see! I was assuming this was something Glyphs was generating and embedding in the OTF. Makes sense that the platform OS would be doing it by deduction. Implies that by adding just a handful of additional Latin characters I could “unlock” most of the European languages, etc. But since I can’t forcibly change this I won’t worry about it :slight_smile: Thanks