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Comment by eukgoekoko | Hacker News Reader

> wide dispersal of compatible fonts

Would you please share a link where I can download Mongolian Helvetica?

Why? If you were designing a website with Mongolian as a language option you would choose a font that has support for Mongolian, not something completely unsuitable like Helvetica. The same goes for any language not written with a Latin alphabet.

If you don't want to provide a font and just want whatever passes for sans-serif on a computer with Mongolian fonts installed, use font-family: sans-serif; in your CSS and let the OS handle it.

Sure, I can go with font-family: sans-serif But what if I have to add Mongolian support for a website using Helvetica typeface for the currently used Cyrillic script?

You can't, but this is nothing new. Fonts tend to support a subset of scripts. You just got lucky with Cyrillic that a Helvetica version supporting it exists.

Here you would choose a Mongolian font and add it to the font-stack in CSS for that language, just as you would for Arabic or Chinese. If you want a grotesque typeface that matches Helvetica in style for Mongolian, use one.

> You just got lucky with Cyrillic that a Helvetica version supporting it exists.

This is hardly a coincedence that Cyrillic alphabet has broader support and adoption among fonts.

Why would you need a specific typeface? Your goal is to get characters displaying to the user rather than tofu.

Having said that, the place to look for multiscript support in Helvetica would be Linotype’s Neue Helvetica World: https://www.linotype.com/5553118/neue-helvetica-world-family... . Unfortunately, while they currently support 103 languages, Mongolian isn’t among them. I guess if this restoration takes off it might become part of the next release.

Google's Noto project has a decent sans-serif Mongolian script typeface (https://www.google.com/get/noto/#sans-mong) that is pre-installed on newer Android and iOS devices.

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