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 Foundry 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.
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.
A note about double-mapping
If you have "double-mapped" your uppercase characters to your lowercase glyph boxes, please know that our font validator will still show a yellow error for your character set, and will show the lowercase glyphs as missing. Please leave a note in the comments section letting the reviewer know that you have double-mapped these glyphs so that they will not reject the family. When they see your note, they will download your font and check to make sure this double-mapping works properly. If you do not leave a comment, it is likely your submission will be rejected.
Make sure your character sets match if you submit multiple fonts
Please make sure that all fonts in a family have the same characters in them. This will create a better customer experience, as most customers would expect the fonts that are grouped and sold together to have the same characters in them. This obviously excludes swash fonts, icon fonts, or any other "accessory" fonts - these can definitely be a far smaller character set, no problem. Any fonts like sans, serif, script, italic, regular, bold, etc that are all in the same family should have the same character set.
Don't forget currency symbols!
A common reason we reject fonts is because a common currency symbol is left out. Everything else about the font and submission is fine, which makes the rejection such a bummer. Remember that people all over the world buy fonts, and they need the currency symbol that matches their currency for the font to be useful for them. Make sure to include at least $, €, ¥, £, and ¢. You can always add more too!
Take the extra step and add more 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. Remember, the more characters you add that are properly designed add utility to your font, and thus make it more desirable or valuable to customers. 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.
Non-Latin Fonts
Some fonts with Arabic, Korean, Japanese, Hebrew, Chinese, etc character sets just aren't about the latin characters and not designed for western audiences. While we definitely recommend designing a set of latin glyphs that coordinate with your font (since this will increase the number of potential customers that may be able to use and thus buy your font!), some designers may choose not to do this. If not, that's ok. You have two options:
You may choose to add a generic font to the latin glyph boxes, but it must be a font with an open license that allows modification and reselling. There are many different licenses that allow this; for example the Apache License. Be sure to check the license of the font you're using carefully to ensure that this is allowed. Please double check the license to ensure that this is allowed. Open Source doesn't necessarily mean that this use is allowed. If you use a font with a license that requires crediting the original font/designer, please credit the font or designer in your font's description. If the license requires that you deliver the license to any recipients of the work or derivative works, please include a link to the license in the font file's metadata (for example, the Apache license provides instructions for this).
You may choose to add no latin characters at all. If this is the case, please make the language coverage restrictions clear in your description. Please note that this may negatively impact the success of your fonts.
In these situations, since you aren't making original latin glyphs, your marketing posters and font branding should be aimed at the specific audience for which the language set covers. Your font previews will appear in the font's primary language, not English.