The unicode-range
CSS descriptor sets the specific range of characters to be used from a font defined by @font-face
and made available for use on the current page. If the page doesn't use any character in this range, the font is not downloaded; if it uses at least one, the whole font is downloaded.
The purpose of this descriptor is to allow the font resources to be segmented so that a browser only needs to download the font resource needed for the text content of a particular page. For example, a site with many localizations could provide separate font resources for English, Greek and Japanese. For users viewing the English version of a page, the font resources for Greek and Japanese fonts wouldn't need to be downloaded, saving bandwidth.
Related at-rule | @font-face |
---|---|
Initial value | U+0-10FFFF |
Media | all |
Computed value | as specified |
Canonical order | order of appearance in the formal grammar of the values |
Syntax
/* <unicode-range> values */ unicode-range: U+26; /* single codepoint */ unicode-range: U+0-7F; unicode-range: U+0025-00FF; /* codepoint range */ unicode-range: U+4??; /* wildcard range */ unicode-range: U+0025-00FF, U+4??; /* multiple values */
Values
- single codepoint
- A single Unicode character code point, for example
U+26
. - codepoint range
- A range of Unicode code points. So for example,
U+0025-00FF
means include all characters in the rangeU+0025
toU+00FF
. - wildcard range
- A range of Unicode code points containing wildcard characters, that is using the
'?'
character, so for exampleU+4??
means include all characters in the rangeU+400
toU+4FF
.
Formal syntax
<unicode-range>#
Examples
We create a simple HTML containing a single <div>
element, including an ampersand, that we want to style with a different font. To make it obvious, we will use a sans-serif font, Helvetica, for the text, and a serif font, Times New Roman, for the ampersand.
<div>Me & You = Us</div>
In the CSS, you can see that we are in effect defining a completely separate @font-face
that only includes a single character in it, meaning that only this character will be styled with this font. We could also have done this by wrapping the ampersand in a <span>
and applying a different font just to that, but that is an extra element and rule set.
@font-face { font-family: 'Ampersand'; src: local('Times New Roman'); unicode-range: U+26; } div { font-size: 4em; font-family: Ampersand, Helvetica, sans-serif; }
Reference result
Live result
Specifications
Specification | Status | Comment |
---|---|---|
CSS Fonts Module Level 3 The definition of 'unicode-range' in that specification. |
Candidate Recommendation | Initial definition |
Browser compatibility
Feature | Firefox (Gecko) | Chrome | Edge | Internet Explorer | Opera | Safari |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Basic support | 44 (44)[1] | (Yes)[2] | (Yes) | 9.0[2] | (Yes)[2] | (Yes)[2] |
Feature | Android | Edge | Firefox Mobile (Gecko) | IE Mobile | Opera Mini | Opera Mobile | Safari Mobile |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Basic support | (Yes) | (Yes) | 44.0 (44)[1] | 9.0 | No support | 10.0 | (Yes) |
[1] From Firefox 4 through Firefox 34, the unicode-range
descriptor in @font-face
rules was parsed but the codepoint range ignored. From Firefox 35, unicode-range
can be enabled on non-Linux platforms using the layout.css.unicode-range.enabled
pref, which was on by default in nightly/developer builds. On Linux, this was possible from Firefox 41 onwards.
[2] Firefox and Chrome respect the unicode-range
value when deciding which fonts to download (from Chrome 36, Chromium bug 247920). Safari and Internet Explorer ignore the unicode-range value when deciding which fonts to download but respect it when deciding which font to use.