Is there somewhere I can get a list of what would be a normal expected set of characters for a commercial font? This seems to vary widely and, while very useful to have available all the character spaces proviced in a new file in Font Creator, there seem to be many characters that would not normally be needed or practical for the average user.
Thanks again,
Sue
You can find a short list of recommended glyphs here.
If you’re using the Professional edition of Font Creator, it takes very little extra work to add all of the accented characters in the ANSI character (displayed in Windows Character Map) using the Complete Composites feature. That will support Western European languages like French, German, Italian, etc.
Think about your target audience. If it is only for English, the recommended glyph set will be adequate. The WGL4 set, which forms the basis for new fonts, covers a wide range of uses — not just regular text. There is no harm in leaving the empty glyphs in your font, but they can easily be removed with Select Incomplete if you are sure you don’t need them.
For Eastern European languages like Polish and Czech one will need Latin-Extended-A and a few from Latin-Extended-B for Romanian.
The rest of Latin Extended-B is only needed for phonetics, African languages that use Latin scripts, or other obscure languages. The Letter Database is a good reference to check which characters are needed for each language.
Is there somewhere I can get a list of what would be a normal expected set of characters for a commercial font?
One such list is on the following web page.
http://www.itcfonts.com/about/submit.asp?nCo=AFMT
… is a good reference to check which characters are needed for each language.
The following may also be of interest.
http://www.evertype.com/alphabets/index.html
There are links to each of a collection of pdf documents, each one of which has the requirements for one language.
William Overington