A professional font is more than just A–Z and 0–9. Users need complete punctuation marks, currency symbols beyond the dollar sign, and diacritics (accents, umlauts etc.) including other special characters for languages other than English.
We expect all new fonts meet our minimum recommended character set. We make exceptions for highly decorative fonts and of course icon/symbol fonts.
To be competitive, we strongly recommend creating even more characters to support a wider range of languages. Not sure where to start? Try Adobe Latin 3 (331 characters) or Underware’s Latin Plus (445 characters). Want to figure out what languages your font supports? Check out Underware’s cool tool here.
If your font is a caps only font, please duplicate the caps into the boxes for the lowercase letters. This makes it easier for customers to use your fonts. Even better, design a coordinating small caps or lowercase set!
Remember, you’re creating these characters for a reason; these characters exist because customers need them. The more languages and currencies your fonts support, the more potential customers you have!
Helpful Resources
- Eki.ee - Data on languages
- Michael Everson - The Alphabets of Europe
- Dt1.org - Font Coverage Test
- Underware - Validate Character Set
- Omniglot - Writing Systems by Language
- GlyphTable is an InDesign script* that creates a document with all glyphs of the selected font.
Please note that the glyphs are inserted as glyphs and not as text. By changing the Display Performance (View > Display Performance > Fast or High Quality) you will be able to see examples of un-removed overlaps.
Based on FontTableMW
Original script by Eric Menninga, Adobe Systems Inc.
Modified and expanded by Chuck Weger, Elara Systems, LLC
Slightly adapted by Florian Hardwig
*Learn how to install scripts in InDesign here. Download the script here. - Copy and pastable list of cyrillic characters: АБВГДЕЁЖЗИЙКЛМНОПРСТУФХЧЦШЩЬЪЫЭЮЯабвгдеёжзийклмнопрстуфхчцшщьъыэюя