unicode-range property - CSS Reference

Definition and Usage

The unicode-range CSS descriptor sets the specific range of characters to be downloaded from a font defined by @font-face and made available for use on the current page.

This descriptor can be used to make a custom @font-face contains only the characters that needs to be downloaded, saving on bandwidth.

Note: Web developer should always include a fallback font that is acceptable in case the unicode-range descriptor @font-face is not supported and the whole at-rule being invalid.

Initial valueU+0-10FFFF
Usagein a @font-face at-rule
Media visual
CSSOM property CSSFontFaceRule.unicodeRange

Syntax

Formal syntax: <urange>#
        where: <urange> = single_codepoint | codepoint_range | wildcard_range

unicode-range: U+26               /* single_codepoint */
unicode-range: U+0025-00FF        /* codepoint_range */
unicode-range: U+4??              /* wildcard_range */
unicode-range: U+0025-00FF, U+4?? /* multiple values can be separated by commas */

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 range U+0025 to U+00FF.
wildcard_range: A range of unicode code points containing wildcard characters, that is using the '?' character, so for example U+4?? means include all characters in the range U+400 to U+4FF.

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 we don't need to download the entire font to get what we want if it is a hosted font, and if it is a local font as in this example, we can at least cut down on extra markup and styles. 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 ruleset.

@font-face {
  font-family: 'Ampersand';
  src: local('Times New Roman');
  unicode-range: U+26;
}
div {
  font-size: 4em;
  font-family: Ampersand, Helvetica, sans-serif;
}