Free Romanian font (.ttf)?

[Brynjolfr]

Is there one?

[Riptide]

Romanian uses the Latin alphabet (except for Moldovan which also uses the Cyrillic alphabet), so any font that is based on the Latin alphabet that includes the basic special characters should work.

[Brynjolfr]

I'm having trouble finding such a font. Closest thing I've found was one that had all the special characters except for "â"

[AdiJapan]

I'm having trouble finding such a font. Closest thing I've found was one that had all the special characters except for "â"

I don't think there is any font out there that contains the characters ă î ș ț and doesn't contain â. Of the five Romanian characters, â and î are the most widely supported, probably because they are also used in writing French.

To answer your first question, if you use Windows Vista or 7 then you already have full support of the Romanian characters with several fonts, such as Arial, Times New Roman, Trebuchet, Verdana and I think Palatino. If you use Windows XP or 2000 you can install this font update, which gives you four font sets for Romanian. With Mac you should have no problems at all, as they have supported Romanian for over a decade now (Microsoft is kinda slow, you know). With other OS's I don't have much direct experience, but I hear the tendency is to offer full support, with exceptions generally limited to mobile OS's such as Symbian.

Additionally, there are plenty of free fonts to download. I've tested several and some are quite nice. I particularly like Gentium (you can easily google it), because it supports a wide range of Unicode characters, including phonetic symbols and lots of others.

[Brynjolfr]

Thanks alot! However, I'd like a font that replaces non-Romanian characters on the keyboard (like "å", "ä", "ö", "k" etc.) with Romanian ones. Typing a hex-code for every special character is rather inconvinient compared to that.

[loqu]

Thanks alot! However, I'd like a font that replaces non-Romanian characters on the keyboard (like "å", "ä", "ö", "k" etc.) with Romanian ones. Typing a hex-code for every special character is rather inconvinient compared to that.

I don't think any font would do that... rather change your keyboard layout so that when you press any key labelled to non-Romanian letters, the computer interprets them as Romanian ones.

[AdiJapan]

Thanks alot! However, I'd like a font that replaces non-Romanian characters on the keyboard (like "å", "ä", "ö", "k" etc.) with Romanian ones. Typing a hex-code for every special character is rather inconvinient compared to that.

In that case you're not looking for a font, because all the fonts have the same character at the same code (if they don't it's an error). What you need is a Romanian keyboard driver, as loqu says above. Depending on your OS, you either already have the driver installed and you just have to turn it on, or you must download and install it separately. For instance, in Windows 7 and I think also Vista, you can add a new keyboard layout from the Control Panel, under the regional settings.

[Brynjolfr]

I found a Romanian keyboard driver! Ţţ Ăă Îî Ââ Şş

[AdiJapan]

I found a Romanian keyboard driver! Ţţ Ăă Îî Ââ Şş

Excellent. Now you should know that there are two types of encodings for the characters Ș and Ț:

1. The standard one is with commas below the letters: Ș ș Ț ț. The problem is that they belong to a rather new version of Unicode, which means they are not supported by older OS's and applications.

2. The still acceptable one, while non-standard, is with cedillas: Ş ş Ţ ţ. This is supported more widely, but is now slowly becoming outdated. Ş with cedilla is standard for Turkish and a few other languages. Ţ with cedilla is not used by any language; it came to exist only by mistake.

When printed these letter variants look similar in certain fonts, but in the digital medium, with searches and other text processing (text-to-speech, replacing, spellchecking, etc.), things might not work right if you use the other variant, because the codes are different.

Your keyboard driver probably allows you to select which you prefer to use, the standard one, or the so-called legacy one (which you used above).