No educational typeface within the European Union supports all necessary characters for all European languages.

Using the Austrian educational typeface, it is, e.g. not possible to write characters of another language, like the ø in Bjørn. On the computer you can never add a character that is not contained in the educational font. It will neither appear on the screen nor will it be printed. Depending on software and operating system a placeholder symbol will show up instead:

Fehlende Zeichen

It does not help trying to add an accent to a character with the keyboard. If the character with the accent is not available in the font, it will not appear on the screen. These characters are also not contained in the educational typeface, because they have not been legally defined.

 

An educational typeface with an incomplete character set
An example for an incomplete educational typeface is the Austrian “Schulschrift 1995”. This educational typeface and the Austrian situation as such may serve as an example for other European countries and their educational typefaces, because their situation is similar.

The Croatian language of Burgenland, the language of the Roma, the Slovak, Slovenian, Hungarian and the Czech languages are legally protected languages of autochthon minorities in Austria. These minorities have the legal right of being taught in their mother tongue (comp. Minority Languages in Austria ).

The Austrian educational typeface, however, lacks the necessary characters for these autochthon languages.

Following is the page of the Austrian curriculum for primary schools that contains all characters of “Schulschrift 1995“:

Österreichische Schulschrift

Apart from autochthon minorities there are many other languages in Austria that are spoken by people who have their major living interests in Austria and many of whom also have Austrian citizenship. Their languages, however, are not protected by minority law and therefore they have no legal right of being taught in their mother tongue (comp. Minority Languages in Austria ). Again, these languages can neither be read nor written with the Austrian educational typeface.

 

Available characters of the Austrian educational typeface
The Austrian educational typeface and, hence, its computer font – contains only a small section of the characters required to write all European languages correctly. With the Austrian educational typeface you can only write the letters A-Z, a-z, Ä, Ö, Ü, ä, ö, ü und ß. All other characters are not available and, therefore, many other languages cannot be written with the computer:

Schriftzeichen der österreichischen Schulschrift

Two further examples from France and Poland:

Ecriture-A

Elementarz

By way of comparison, here is an example of a typeface with a wide selection of characters, with which you can write all languages of the European Union. This typeface is neither an educational typeface, nor can it serve as a cursive  (see FAQ).

 

Available characters of the Unicode font “Arial”

Schriftzeichen Arial