Windows Glyph List 4, or more commonly WGL4 for short, also known as the ''Pan-European character set'', is a

character Character or Characters may refer to: Arts, entertainment, and media Literature * ''Character'' (novel), a 1936 Dutch novel by Ferdinand Bordewijk * ''Characters'' (Theophrastus), a classical Greek set of character sketches attributed to The ...

repertoire on Microsoft operating systems comprising 657

Unicode Unicode, formally The Unicode Standard,The formal version reference is is an information technology Technical standard, standard for the consistent character encoding, encoding, representation, and handling of Character (computing), text expre ...

characters, two of them private use. Its purpose is to provide an implementation guideline for producers of fonts for the representation of

European European, or Europeans, or Europeneans, may refer to: In general * ''European'', an adjective referring to something of, from, or related to Europe ** Ethnic groups in Europe ** Demographics of Europe ** European cuisine, the cuisines of Europe ...

natural language In neuropsychology, linguistics, and philosophy of language, a natural language or ordinary language is any language that has evolved naturally in humans through use and repetition without conscious planning or premeditation. Natural languages ...

s; fonts that provide

glyph A glyph () is any kind of purposeful mark. In typography, a glyph is "the specific shape, design, or representation of a character". It is a particular graphical representation, in a particular typeface, of an element of written language. A g ...

s for the entire set of characters can claim WGL4 compliance and thus can expect to be compatible with a wide range of software. , WGL4 characters were the only ones guaranteed to display correctly on Microsoft Windows. More recent versions of Windows display far more glyphs. Because many fonts are designed to fulfill the WGL4 set, this set of characters is likely to work (display as other than replacement glyphs) on many computer systems. For example, all the non-private-use characters in the table below are likely to display properly, compared to the many missing characters that may be seen in other articles about Unicode.

Repertoire

The repertoire, defined by

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational technology corporation producing computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at the Microsoft Redmond campus located in Redmond, Washing ...

, encompasses all the characters found in Microsoft's

code page In computing, a code page is a character encoding and as such it is a specific association of a set of printable characters and control characters with unique numbers. Typically each number represents the binary value in a single byte. (In some co ...

1252 Year 1252 ( MCCLII) was a leap year starting on Monday (link will display the full calendar) of the Julian calendar. Events By place Europe * April 6 – Saint Peter of Verona is assassinated by Carino of Balsamo. * May 15 – P ...

(''Windows Western''),

1250 Year 1250 ( MCCL) was a common year starting on Saturday (link will display the full calendar) of the Julian calendar. Events By place World * The world population is estimated at between 400 and 416 million individuals. * World climat ...

(''Windows Central European''),

1251 Year 1251 ( MCCLI) was a common year starting on Sunday (link will display the full calendar) of the Julian calendar. Events By place Europe * April – The first Shepherds' Crusade, a domestic French uprising in response to events ...

(''Windows Cyrillic''), 1253 (''Windows Greek''), 1254 (''Windows Turkish''), and

1257 Year 1257 (Roman numerals, MCCLVII) was a common year starting on Monday (link will display the full calendar) of the Julian calendar. Events By place Europe * Spring – The Epirote–Nicaean conflict (1257–59), Epirote–Nicae ...

(''Windows Baltic''), as well as characters from

MS-DOS MS-DOS ( ; acronym for Microsoft Disk Operating System, also known as Microsoft DOS) is an operating system for x86-based personal computers mostly developed by Microsoft. Collectively, MS-DOS, its rebranding as IBM PC DOS, and a few ope ...

codepage 437 Code page 437 (CCSID 437) is the character set of the original IBM PC (personal computer). It is also known as CP437, OEM-US, OEM 437, PC-8, or DOS Latin US. The set includes all printable ASCII characters as well as some accented letters (diacr ...

. It does not cover the combining diacritics used by Vietnamese-related

code page 1258 Windows-1258 is a code page used in Microsoft Windows to represent Vietnamese texts. It makes use of combining diacritical marks. Windows-1258 is compatible with neither the Vietnamese standard ( TCVN 5712 / VSCII), nor the various other encodi ...

, the Thai letters used in

code page 874 ISO/IEC 8859-11:2001, ''Information technology — 8-bit single-byte coded graphic character sets — Part 11: Latin/Thai alphabet'', is part of the ISO/IEC 8859 series of ASCII-based standard character encodings, first edition published in 2001. I ...

, Hebrew and Arabic letters covered by code pages

1255 Year 1255 ( MCCLV) was a common year starting on Friday (link will display the full calendar) of the Julian calendar. Events By place Europe * February 25 – Battle of Montebruno: Guelph forces under Thomas II of Savoy invade ...

and 1256, or the ideographic characters used by code pages

932 Year 932 ( CMXXXII) was a leap year starting on Sunday (link will display the full calendar) of the Julian calendar. Events By place Europe * Summer – Alberic II leads an uprising at Rome against his stepfather Hugh of Provence ...

936 Year 936 ( CMXXXVI) was a leap year starting on Friday (link will display the full calendar) of the Julian calendar. Events By place Europe * June 19 – At Laon, Louis IV, the 14-year old son of the late King Charles the Simp ...

949 Year 949 ( CMXLIX) was a common year starting on Monday (link will display the full calendar) of the Julian calendar. Events By place Byzantine Empire * Arab-Byzantine War: Hamdanid forces under Sayf al-Dawla raid into the theme of Ly ...

and

950 Year 950 ( CML) was a common year starting on Tuesday (link will display the full calendar) of the Julian calendar. Events By place Byzantine Empire * Arab–Byzantine War: A Hamdanid army (30,000 men) led by Sayf al-Dawla raids int ...

. It also does not cover the Romanian letters Ș, ș, Ț, and ț (U+0218–B), which were added to several of Microsoft's fonts for

Windows Vista Windows Vista is a major release of the Windows NT operating system developed by Microsoft. It was the direct successor to Windows XP, which was released five years before, at the time being the longest time span between successive releases of ...

(long after the WGL4 repertoire was originally defined). In version 1.5 of the OpenType Specification (May 2008) four Cyrillic characters were added to the WGL4 character set: Ѐ (U+0400), Ѝ (U+040D), ѐ (U+0450) and ѝ (U+045D).

Character table

;Legend

Notes

External links

WGL4.0 Character Set
on Microsoft Typography {{character encoding Digital typography Microsoft Windows multimedia technology Character encoding Glyphs Articles with unsupported PUA characters

Repertoire

Character table

Notes

See also

External links