chase is typesetting
291 of the 1,942 families on Google Fonts
can spell ʻōlelo Hawaiʻi.

A real ʻokina – the turned-comma consonant, U+02BB, not an apostrophe – and the full kahakō set, Āā Ēē Īī Ōō Ūū. Another 1,035 families carry the kahakō but borrow their ʻokina from your operating system. This page checked the glyph tables of all 1,938, on July 29, 2026 – re-checks them live, in your browser – and takes the census again every week as the catalog grows.

 
the rule

The ʻokina is a consonant – the glottal stop – with its own letter. The kahakō stretches a vowel long. Substitute an apostrophe, or drop a macron, and you are writing different words. A typeface that lacks these glyphs doesn't fail loudly: your browser quietly borrows the missing letters from a system font, and the seams show in the middle of a word.

one of these is a letter
ʻokina · u+02bb Hawaiʻi
apostrophe · left quote Hawai'i · Hawai‘i
four words, three marks apart
paufinished
paʻusoot
paʻūdamp
pāʻūskirt
the fonts on your machine

Same test, run right now on your operating system's own faces. Results depend on your OS and versions – your machine may disagree with someone else's.

off google

Google Fonts is only one shelf. On Adobe Fonts, the Source families (Source Sans, Serif and Code – Adobe's own open designs, counted in the census above) carry the full Hawaiian set, and many Adobe Originals cover extended Latin – but Adobe doesn't publish per-glyph coverage, so test before you commit a brand to one.

The gold standard for language coverage is SIL – Gentium and Charis were built for exactly this and are free. Some foundries now sell Hawaiian-ready families outright, and Font Squirrel keeps a filterable list. For the deeper story of Hawaiian text on computers, Keola Donaghy's notes are the community reference.

Whatever the source: paste pāʻū into the type tester before you license. If the ʻokina looks like it came from a different font, it did.

about

chase is typesetting is a census. The ʻokina (ʻ) is a consonant with its own letter – a turned comma, U+02BB, not an apostrophe – and the kahakō stretches vowels long: ā ē ī ō ū. One consonant and two marks are all that separate pau, paʻu, paʻū and pāʻū – finished, soot, damp, skirt. Most typefaces never planned for any of this.

So this page went through the glyph tables of every family on Google Fonts and kept the ones that can really spell ʻōlelo Hawaiʻi – then re-proves each verdict live in your browser by drawing the letters and comparing pixels against your system's fallback. It runs the same test on your machine's own fonts.

The stack. A build-time Python crawl (fonttools) reads the glyph tables of every family on Google Fonts and writes the census; a GitHub Action re-runs it weekly, so the page keeps itself current as the catalog grows. In your browser, the FontFace API loads each specimen and a canvas pixel-diff re-proves every verdict against your system's fallback. One self-contained file – no libraries, no server, no analytics.

I'm Chase Conching – a designer/developer in Honolulu making a series of small experiments at chase.is.

chase@chase.is · github · linkedin