Windows Glyph List 4 (WGL4)

New "Pan-European" character set standard

Microsoft has defined a new "Pan-European" character set standard, Windows Glyph List 4 (WGL4), that contains 652 characters required in Western, Central, and Eastern European writing systems, and Greek and Turkish. The WGL4 character set covers several major codepages: 1250 for Eastern European languages, 1251 for Cyrillic, 1252 for US English, 1253 for Greek, and 1254 for Turkish. Before WGL4, a user typing characters in English, Cyrillic, and Greek would have to select three different fonts, Times New Roman, Times New Roman Cyrillic, and Times New Roman Greek, in order to access all of the characters. Now, a user can load a single WGL4 font and change codepages as needed. WGL4 fonts are not required under Windows 95, which will continue to support fonts that worked under Windows 3.1.

The WGL4 character set is listed in Revision 1.65 of the TrueType 1.0 Font File Specification (available on MSDN) where it is compared to the Win 3.1 ANSI, UGL, and Macintosh character sets. WGL4 takes advantage of the ability of Windows 95 to address characters according to their Unicode double-byte character codes using API extensions.

Microsoft is supporting font developers as they create new WGL4 fonts. Font developers also may create fonts for Windows 95 with large character sets other than WGL4, but the characters must exist in the codepages supported by Windows 95 for users to access the glyphs.

WGL4 fonts will be released on the CD ROM version of Windows 95, and released for "Pan-European" countries, but will not be available on floppy disk versions of Windows 95 that are released domestically.