Hi everyone, I have to design a font dedicated to programming for a client, and I'm wondering about the required character set. I've observed that all the popular programming fonts feature extensive character sets, but I assume this is because they are derived from standard sans-serif charsets. And because, anyway, "who can do more can do less".
But I wouldn't like to burden my client with useless characters. So I'm inclined to reduce the font to the 95 ascii characters, as I believe coding doesn't requires any other characters. Am I correct ? or would a programming font should contain more ?
I could also put out my question this way : is there an "official" computer coding characters list, richer than the ascii list ?
Comments
* I would also ask what programming languages they are using. Chances are that the code itself is limited to ASCII, but there are some programming languages that use special characters.
- let π = 3.14159
- let 你好 = "你好世界"
- let 🐶🐮 = "dogcow"
But to add to Peter and John’s mention of strings, code comments may also use languages other than English, or include text graphics, etc.My client's programming language is Python. I found all the specs about encoding here.
And I'm definitely going to have to see with him the precise character set he needs.
Just like a normal font, actually.