We often go all the way when designing the font and include every glyph on the unicode list. I know I have. However, there are many that are completely obsolete and do not need to be included, even for past-proofing. Please everyone from their own corner of the world post such glyphs here, so we can save ourselves precious time.
My 2 cents:
You do NOT need to include historical Cyrillic glyphs from old orthographies before WW2.
https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Юс_большойhttps://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ять are not used anywhere.
Comments
I think using lists of characters or unicode blocks to be included or lists of characters to be omitted from those blocks is the wrong way to go about deciding on a character set. Instead, one should decide upon their target audience and the glyphs necessary to satisfy the needs of that target audience.
André
One great truth, that I first heard expressed by Maxim Zhukov, is that the finer points of our multi-script designs are for other type designers (and perhaps a few expert typographers). This was confirmed when I was at the St Petersburg ATypI conference in 2008 and showing some Scotch Modern print-outs to some Russian graphic designers and one pointed to the Big Yus and said “That’s a strange-looking Zhe”. The upshot is that the majority of Cyrillic font users know very little about their historic, deprecated characters.
My dream is that some sunny day I would be able to compile a comprehensive pro bono database of all Latin, Cyrillic and Greek glyphs, unicode codepoint by unicode codepoint. That would be the ultimate reference and would save us and newcomers a ton of time and sweat. It is not so much the major rules like "start with the H and O", but the special cases that need attention. Same as with law and jurisprudence, in my opinion.But there is always something coming up and I have to make a living like everybody else.
- do not include: genuine deprecated characters or stupid characters included in Unicode that nobody ever used like ₯. Not-recommended characters like Ldot.
- historical characters
- uncommon characters. These are characters which are still technically in use for their respective languages but for languages under 10000* readers and/or which have with little to no websites set in that language
- scholarly: common IPA characters that you might see on Wikipedia. Common historical characters like long s. Ring acutes. Imagine someone is making a typeface that's unlikely to be used to set a textbook...these could be omitted.
- uncommon mathematical symbols like ⌀ (diameter) that are likely be used outside of a math textbook
- heavy mathematical (maybe overlaps with scholarly?)
- text-only: characters which aren't required for a pure display typeface. Examples: paragraph and section symbols
Dropbox linkThere are no colors because I had to put the project is on hold a few years ago. I hope this spreadsheet will save you a few weeks of research.
* It's hard to draw the line on whether or not a language is "worth supporting". I think if you're making a OS font, you'll want to include everything. But sometimes I think it's a statistical impossibility that some glyphs will ever be used. There are orthographic representations of spoken languages or non-Latin languages which aren't in common use. For example, Pan Nigerian and Pinyin with would fit with scholarly. Maybe there should be a flag for "disputed" so people can read an explanation and make their own decision.
I just love reading a thread about what glyphs we can leave out of fonts... having glyph failures in the discussion because of the glyphs that were omitted from the forum font.
And here Christian proves me wrong with a counterexample to my claim which, I think, proves the futility of attempting to identify which glyphs will never be used.
André
*off topic but I really don't think this site should be using embedded fonts of any kind. It's an impediment to the discussion of type. Give me OS core fonts, please.
I ღ Cats
So apparently you can't even make latin fonts without throwing in a few Mkhedruli glyphs just in case people need them as emojis
And has anyone ever seen an f_f_j ligature in the wild? Google search for *ffj*returns only the acronyms for Fermented Fruit Juice and Full-Fledged Jerk.
I wonder about other ligatures which some providers include: f_b, f_k for example. Are they used in any language?
Not if you have proper kerning