Testing Unicode coverage for fonts is always a problem and I decided to create a simple set of character sets for testing the coverage. I’ve splitted them by language groups based on regions. Using these strings should be quite easy.
You should remembers some things:
- This article is still under development.
- It’s not safe to test font strings inside the browsers because they do have font-fallback
- soon I will add font-coverage for the most used fonts
Simple scripts – Latin, Cyrillic and Greek
Groups from 1-4 are additive, so characters already included in previous groups are removed
Group 1 – Basic – 5 languages – en, fr, es, de, it
ºßàáâãäåæçèéêëìíîïñòóôöø
ùúûüÿāăčēĕīĭōŏœšūŭžǔ
Group 2 – Western – 6 languages – da, fi, nb, nl, pt, sv
õđńŋřŧǎǥǧǩǯȟʒ
Group 3 – Eastern – 10 languages – ro, tr, pl, cs, hu, sk ,hr, et, lv, sl
ýąćďđėęěğģįİıķĺļľłņňőŕ
śşţťůűųźżșțіїј
Group 4 – Cyrillic – 5 languages – ru, uk bg lt sr
абвгдежзийклмнопрстуф
хцчшщъыьэюяѐёђєіїјљњ
ћѝџѣѫґ
Group 5- Greek
… TBD
Complex Scripts (to be done)
- Japanese
- Korean
- Chinese
- Arabic
- Hebrew
- Greek
How to test fonts under Windows ?
If you want to see character coverage you should use BabelMap, and if you want to write different texts you can use BabelPad. These two tools the best I’ve found so far and are free.
English 
Română
There is a utility in our Globalyzer software, called PseudoJudo which will help you append your current strings with these characters, so that you can still perform internationalization testing, without knowing the target languages. You can create pseudo-locales with expanded characters surrounding your current strings, and pass them through the interface, database and your various pages and application components. See http://www.globalyzer.com/gi/whatsnew.html#pseudoexp or http://www.lingoport.com for more info.
The problem with most tools (like BabelPad, or PseudoJudo) is that the they use (indirectly) all the Windows tricks to make things work (font mapping, linking, substitution, etc.)
So you might see Chinese character (or whatever) even if they are not present in the font.
So if you want to test *font coverage* (not application’s ability to display a certain character), then you need something that looks in the belly of the font to get the real deal.
Example: http://www.mihai-nita.net/article.php?artID=charmapex
(red characters are not really in the font, but displayed thru “Windows magic”)
Of course, you can do better than visual testing. You can dump the font content and check that, automatically.
Thanks for the remark Mihai. There is an option in BabelMap for using a single font instead of Composite (Font menu). Also there is the Composite Font Mappings dialog where you can configure how the mappings are done and save/load these configurations.