MYFONTS FOUNDRY TOOLS

This 2-page pdf is a companion document to MyFonts’ guide Common Errors in Type Design — Incomplete character sets.

Minimum for display fonts – must be supported to be accepted

a b c d e f g h i j k l mn o p q r s t u v w x y z
A B C D E F G H I J K L MNO P Q R S T U VWX Y Z
�
.notdef space
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 ¹ ² ³ %€ $ ¢ £ ¥
á â à ä å ã æ ç é ê è ë í î ì ï ı ñ ó ô ò ö õ øœ š ß ú û ù ü ý ÿ ž
Á  À Ä Å ÃÆÇ É Ê È Ë Í Î Ì Ï Ñ Ó Ô Ò Ö Õ ØŒ Š ÚÛÙÜ Ý Ÿ
. , : ; - –—• · … “ ‘ ’ ‘ ‚ “ ” „ ‹ › « » / \ ? ! ¿ ¡ ( ) [ ] { }
† * & © ® @# § + × = _ ° |
This is the bare minimum for Latin-based display fonts. Note that this limited character set supports a few major Western languages only.
We highly recommend to go beyond this minimum and include more languages, in order to make more users happy, see page 2.
After all, it’s the 21st century!

Unfamiliar characters
If you’re not familiar with a certain character from this range, it is a bad idea just make a wild guess at their correct shape. Do your
homework first. You will find several helpful pointers in MyFonts’ guide Common Errors in Type Design.

All-caps fonts
In all-caps fonts, the lowercase needs to be filled with duplicated uppercase glyphs. It often makes sense to add distinct glyphs for the
lowercase, though. Having more than just one set of caps will make your font more useful and attractive. If a true lowercase is not option
for your design, consider a set of alternate caps, e.g. shorter caps (small caps) or stylistic alternates.
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Recommendation for multi-purpose fonts
If you want to support a wider range of languages (and you should!), we recommend to look into these more ambitious character sets:
• Adobe Latin 3 → https://adobe-type-tools.github.io/adobe-latin-charsets/adobe-latin-3.html
The minimum for Adobe’s Pro fonts with Western language support, featuring 331 characters. It combines the minimum of their Std
fonts with the Adobe CE character set including major Latin-based Central European (CE) languages.
• Underware Latin Plus → http://www.underware.nl/latin_plus/character_set/list
With these 446 characters, your font will support over 200 Latin-based languages.

Characters beyond Latin

There is much more than Latin, of course. The latest version of Unicode defines more than 120,000 characters covering 129 modern and
historic writing systems, from Egyptian hieroglyphs to Braille, as well as several symbol sets. There’s no single font that covers the whole
range, but if you are familiar with a certain script (Arabic, Cyrillic, Greek, Hebrew, Hangul – you name it), adding the relevant characters
will certainly render your font more unique. Make sure that the character set is complete and that the glyphs are well-formed and suitable
for native users.
It’s never a bad idea to enhance your font with a few arrows!

Glyphs beyond characters

Having a decent character set with wide language support is good, but seldom enough. Especially if your font is designed for general
professional use – typesetting for books, magazines or annual reports – you need more than that. Depending on your design, you may
want to add:
• multiple numeral sets – lining, oldstyle, tabular, superscripts and subscripts, nominators and denominators for fractions
• small caps  If you do small caps, add them for all alphabetic characters including diacritics. We recommend to additionally
provide small cap variants for numerals and a basic set of punctuation marks and symbols.
• ligatures
• case-sensitive alternates – for punctuation marks, currency symbols, mathematical operators etc.
Most of these glyphs don’t have a Unicode and hence can’t be defined in character sets. You need to provide them via OpenType features.

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