Autonym: a lightweight font to improve multi-language content discoverability

The Autonym font was announced in the Wikimedia blog. The Autonym font is a font that contains only the glyphs that are absolutely necessary for display a list of languages. This small font solves an interesting conflict between UX and performance when dealing with lists of languages.

The problem of discoverability

When content is provided in several languages, you can find a list of languages somewhere. If you support languages for which users may lack their fonts, you have to decide when to deliver those fonts to them or not.

For a page mostly written in Thai, it makes sense to deliver a Thai font to users. However, if the page contains a language list, should you deliver all the fonts necessary to display all languages in that list?

• Deliver fonts impacts bandwidth. On the one hand, if we want all users to be aware that content is available in their language, we had to load a lot of fonts to make sure they display properly. This has a severe impact on bandwidth in a very inefficient way since users are downloading a whole font just to display each language name (e.g., a thai font is downloaded just to display “ไทย”).
• Not delivering fonts harms discoverability. On the other hand, if you don’t deliver fonts to the users for the list of languages, you generate a problem of discoverability. Users lacking local fonts will not be able to discover that behind a link like “□□□□□” there is a version of the content in their language (a version they can display and read once they reach the content thanks to webfonts, but is undiscoverable for them). This problem is illustrated below:

Autonym solves the above problem by including only the glyphs needed to display language names, so language lists can be displayed properly with minimal bandwidth impact. This font will be used in language lists such as the one shown at the Universal Language Selector, or those you find at the sidebar of your favourite Wikipedia articles.

It’s free to use

The font has been created by the Language Engineering team from the Wikimedia Foundation, and you are totally welcome to use it in your own website.

The Autonym font weights about 50KB in size, and provides support for nearly 95% of the 400 supported languages in Wikipedia software. You can use it for free and contribute to its open source repository.