Outdated glyphs

Ermin Međedović

I’d be interested to hear your opinion on glyphs that, for one reason or another, are no longer needed, such as: jacute, aeacute, aemacron, aringacute, oslashacute, kgreenlandic, softhyphen.

I’ve kept them in my character set mostly out of old habit, but my font engineer keeps pointing out that we really don’t need them anymore.

Ray Larabie

I leave out deprecated characters, and I generally omit historical characters unless there’s a clear reason for them to be there.

For a serious text face, broader historical coverage can certainly make sense, especially if the typeface is intended for scholarly or linguistic work. But at that point the expected character set may also extend into things like IPA and other specialist requirements. For most display faces, unless the design has a particular historical purpose or theme, I don’t think including historical characters adds much practical value.

I also rarely include f-ligatures. I normally design the f and adjacent letters such as i so that they work together without needing a ligature to solve collisions. Also, I don't like f-ligatures...just my personal preference.

For display typefaces, I also omit the precomposed Esperanto characters. I’d rather keep the character set focused on forms that are likely to see actual use in the intended context. But I always try to include a dotless j, just in case.

Dsche

Yesterday, I finished a rough draft of a typeface that omits the *ff* and *ffi* ligatures—simply because, this time around, I felt it would be easier and more pleasant to manage the entire menagerie of possible combinations (including, say, the glorious word *Sauerstoffflasche*) using OpenType features.

But the question, as always, is who is footing the bill: if a distributor, platform, or client has standards requiring specific features, you have to either comply. (Just out of curiosity, I ran my fonts through the Google Fonts validator—and was told about missing characters I hadn’t even heard of.)

Daniel Calders

[...] are no longer needed, such as: jacute, aeacute, aemacron, aringacute, oslashacute, kgreenlandic, 

jacute is still in use for stressing the Dutch ij. 

Ermin Međedović

Daniel Calders said:

jacute is still in use for stressing the Dutch ij. 

It is handled via ccmp.

Kent Lew

I tend to include all of those, with the exception of the softhyphen, the handling of which I now consider the responsibility of the layout environment. 

I agree that the jacute can be handled entirely via {ccmp} and is unnecessary as a precomposed glyph, since it has no Unicode encoding. 

The others, however, do have codepoints and so I include them, as they can occur in the text stream and will otherwise either fall back or yield a .notdef. In my workflow, with anchors and classes, they don’t really cost me any effort to include. The kgreenlandic is a slight exception to that, but is relatively inconsequential to derive.

But, as Ray points out, this habit is largely dictated by the type of text faces that I tend to focus on and the intended audience.

jeremy tribby

generally agree with the above about text faces. one other reason to consider including them is for users who want to do wacky stylistic things with homoglyphs, leetspeak etc (not actually sure if there is a broad term for this 🙂)