This question is similar to How to know which of my fonts do or don't support certain glyphs?, but for fonts in font shops, not just fonts I already have.
I need to make a design which includes two relatively rare international characters - ɔ and ɛ:
The vast majority of fonts don't support these characters. Arial does, and Arial Bold, but that's all I've found so far.
What I'd like to do, is find some font store or similar that lets me input the characters I need, and filters out fonts that don't include those characters, leaving me able to browse, choose between and hopefully buy from the few that do.
Does any such service or tool exist?
The above linked question has an answer suggesting going to https://www.myfonts.com/languages/ and choosing the appropriate language. Unfortunately, their languages list is, as they put it, a...
Work in progress
We realize this page is very sparse at the moment. We’re working on it!
...and the 15 options don't match my needs (those two characters are from Sierra Leoneon Krio, it'll be a while before that's added to their list!). So I really do need to search by character, not language.
That said, browsing their "IPA/Phonetic" fonts did turn up an amazing 13 fonts matching my characters, out of 43 (I guess if a font covers IPA, it might well cover everything). It's better than anything else I've tried, but it's not the filter I'm looking for.
It also suggests putting in the text as sample text then scrolling down until something can handle it. This helped with something like the IPA filter but for any other results set, I was literally scrolling past hundreds and hundreds before finding a single match.
Answer
myfonts.com does indeed provide one solution. In the advanced search form, select “available characters” from the field to search, “contains,” and type your character in the search box. Be sure to check the results by looking at the table of glyphs in each font, because I haven’t found the results absolutely reliable, but they do give you a start.
Where is the advanced search form? As on many sites, it shows up only after you do an ordinary search. Silly design, in my opinion, but there it is.
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