some of them are used strictly colloquially —for instance, “k” as an emphasized “c”— or so I heard when I cut a guy off in traffic the last time I was in Italy. But I digress. The slightly reduced alphabet results in frequent letter combinations such as “cc,” “ll,” “tt” and “zz” next to—or surrounded by — “o” or “i.” You can already guess that these combinations can make for some awkward spacing. In southeast Europe, family names often end with “č” or “ć,” and no one likes when a letter in their first or last name is stripped of a diacritic or, even worse, rendered in a fallback typeface. Danish and Norwegian, for example, use “ø,” and German uses “ß” — and those are still only within the Latin alphabet.
Know the characters and combinations in your target language.
In order to cover the extended Latin alphabet, we obviously have to choose a typeface that covers all Central European characters (i.e. use paid fonts). But in cases of the aforementioned letter combinations in less common languages, it wouldn’t hurt to consider typeface candidates that support those particular languages, because at the time of writing, kerning is still not possible with CSS (no pun intended). WE READ FAMILIAR TYPEFACES BEST, BUT WE LEARN BETTER WITH UNFAMILIAR ONES. People are believed to read best in familiar typefaces29 (PDF, 11.5 MB). Even experts — namely, Zuzana Licko and Erik Spiekermann —say that 15