In Russia, this (character) font no longer passes

War hybrid, kinetic war, war of words, now comes the war of fonts… of character. It is a sanction against Russia that no one saw coming, that of the blocking of fonts Times News Roman, Arial, Verdana, Tahoma and Helvetica. The owner of the rights to the fonts, the American company Monotype, has effectively blocked access to its online library for Russian users. To bypass this site restriction, it is necessary to use a VPN set to a country other than Russia. A measure which is added to the cessation of the sale of solutions and software published by Microsoft, whose famous word processor Word uses these fonts. So, obviously, it is impossible to prohibit the use of these fonts on existing software on the territory and they currently remain available in previously installed software. On the other hand, faced with this measure, Russia is looking for fonts with a similar look.

Russian fonts and compatibility issues

This was explained by Aleksey Andreev, president of WPF, the agency managing Russian brands. As an example, he cited the fonts of the Russian company Paratype. And the authorities take this very seriously, to the point that the administrations are starting to opt for these Russian fonts. At the moment, the Ulyanovsk region has been the first to opt for these fonts in its administrative documents.

As is the case for the air sector which symbolically relaunches the production of Tupolevs Tu-214, to try to supply Russian airlines with 100% homemade planes, for these stories of fonts and software suites, the country will seek to put forward its own solutions. Some already exist, such as the Russian office suite MyOffice. A solution that will work internally for the country, because the absence of fonts from Monotype may cause compatibility with documents from abroad.