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Google Web Fonts with Hawaiian Diacritics

Google Web Fonts is a pretty awesome service, considering it’s a free alternative to the larger font collections of TypeKit (also an awesome service).

Embedded web fonts are great, but the Hawaii web design has a dilemma. A lot of place names use Hawaiian diacritics (āēīōūĀĒŌŪĪ) and any time you use the language on a web site there’s a good chance you’ll use a few of these characters. The problem is that not a lot of fonts include these glyphs in their character sets, so we’re limited to the ones that do. This is further complicated by fonts that don’t also include styles for italic, bold, or bold italic.

Google Web Fonts currently has a total of 22 fonts out of 229 that have the Hawaiian diacritics, which is roughly 10%. Of these, only 10 fonts include all font styles.

  • Andika
  • Anonymous Pro *
  • Anton
  • Caudex *
  • Didact Gothic
  • EB Garamond
  • Forum
  • Francois One
  • Gentium Basic *
  • Istok Web *
  • Jura *
  • Kelly Slab
  • Medieval Sharp
  • Modern Antiqua
  • Neuton *
  • Open Sans *
  • Open Sans Condensed *
  • Play *
  • Ruslan Display
  • Tenor Sans
  • Ubuntu *
  • Varela

* fonts support bold, italic, and bold italic