Glyph Set for Book Typesetting

Laurensius Adi

Hi, I'm wondering about the glyph set coverage needed for a font to be eligible to be used on an English book typesetting.

Is there any resource on this?

Thank you.

John Hudson

It will depend on the content of the book, and the style of typography used, which will determine not only the required glyph set but also the range of weights and styles needed. If we’re presuming a non-specialised text, e.g. a novel, then I would recommend—in addition to A–Z, a–z, 0–9, common European diacritic letters for loanwords and foreign names, general punctuation—a full set of smallcaps, common ligatures or ligating contextual variants, at least proportional oldstyle and lining numerals, preferably superscript 0–9 also, fraction variants.

John Savard

One possible resource might be a Monotype matrix-case arrangement. Linotype machines were also used for books, not just for newspapers. So specimen books from those two companies, many of which are available online, are one possible resource.

While I'm not sure you would have much need of fractions if typesetting a novel, if you're going to include superscript 0 to 9 you also need footnote characters: asterisk, dagger, double dagger, parallels, section, and paragraph, although they're used more in non-fiction work.

To get you started, here are the characters in a common Monotype matrix-case arrangement:

The small digits, 5, 7, 9, 10, 18 in some characters are the number of units in their width, and not parts of the characters; thus, 9 and 18 distinguish an en-dash from an em-dash. (I think it may be suspected that the 5-unit quote marks are used for making double quotes.)

And from the 1923 ATF specimen book, here is a list of accented characters in common European languages (it's so old, though, that Czech is called "Bohemian" there):

By including Czech and Hungarian languages, this arrangement goes beyond the most common accents as found in ISO 8859-1 (generally called 8-bit ASCII).

This should get you started, although you should definitely pursue additional resources.

Laurensius Adi

@John Hudson Didn't think of loanwords and foreign name before! Thanks.

@John Savard That's really helpful. Thanks.

I posts this question just out of curiosity, did a google search but can't find a thing there.