Which Glyphs to Include in a Unicode Font?

[Bhikkhu Pesala]

If I start a new Unicode font, the program creates a blank template, which looks like it the WGL4 character set. It has 653 glyphs.

I am contemplating creating a new font using Bitstream's Goudy font as a starting point, and submitting it to them. The reason being that they don't sell a Unicode version of Goudy.

My question is, which characters need to be included? Line-draw, Greek and Cyrillic character sets seem superfluous for a start, and I cannot design them. Would a font be considered incomplete and unprofessional without some characters?

I'm thinking of creating composites only, so all hinting info is preserved. I could add all glyphs for Latin 1, Latin Extended A and B, Additional without much problem.

[Erwin Denissen]

Would a font be considered incomplete and unprofessional without some characters?

A font might be considerd incomplete for a certain script or language. Usually a font should contain at least most of the Latin 1 (Microsoft Windows Codepage 1252) characters. Other recommended characters are described here.

[Bhikkhu Pesala]

Thanks, but that doesn't help, as those characters are required for all fonts, not just Unicode ones. If one looks, for example, at Book Antiqua, it includes glyphs for Greek, Cyrillic, Line-draw, some geometric shapes and miscellaneous symbols. The later two are not likely to cause any difficulty, even the line-draw glyphs would not prove an insurmountable problem, but there is no way I could design satisfactory glyphs for Greek and Cyrillic to match the Goudy Typeface. I wonder if a font would be considered professional if it lacked these characters.

I found some useful information regarding Adobe Character Sets such as Western2

This will give me some guidelines as to which glyphs my fonts should aim to support. Western2 + Latin Extended should be adequate.