Recommended Character Set

The following character set contains 186 glyphs and is our recommended minimum for Latin-based display fonts. This is the character set used by our font validator in Monotype Font Platform. Please note that this limited character set supports a few major Western languages only. We encourage you to add additional characters and language support.

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.

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, 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

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.