Windows Glyph List 4

Windows Glyph List 4, or more commonly WGL4 for short, also known as the "Pan-European character set", is a character repertoire on recent Microsoft's operating systems comprising 652 Unicode characters. Its purpose is to provide an implementation guideline for producers of fonts for the representation of European natural languages; fonts that provide glyphs for the entire set of characters can claim WGL4 compliance and thus can expect to be compatible with a wide range of software.

As of 2004, WGL4 characters are the only ones guaranteed to display correctly on recent versions of all major platforms of Microsoft Windows. Some Unicode characters may be missing from default installations of Windows 9x (such as Armenian and Georgian), of Linux (such as Devanagari) or of Windows XP (such as Ethiopian and Runic), but WGL4 glyphs are found on all major platforms of Microsoft Windows.

Repertoire

The repertoire, defined by Microsoft, encompasses all the characters found in Microsoft’s code pages 1252 ("Windows Western"), 1250 ("Windows Central European"), 1251 ("Windows Cyrillic"), 1253 ("Windows Greek"), 1254 ("Windows Turkish"), and 1257 ("Windows Baltic"), as well as characters from MS-DOS codepage 437.

It does not cover the combining diacritics used by code page 1258, the Thai letters used in code page 874, Hebrew and Arabic letters covered by code pages 1255 and 1256, or the ideographic characters used by code pages 932, 936, 949 and 950.

The following Unicode ranges are found in WGL4:

;Legend

ee also

* Adobe Glyph List

External links

* [http://www.alanwood.net/demos/wgl4.html Using special characters from Windows Glyph List 4 (WGL4) in HTML] by Alan Wood
* [http://www.microsoft.com/OpenType/otspec/wgl4.htm WGL4.0 Character Set] on Microsoft Typography