Font Character Set Planner

Why a character inventory belongs at the start

A font release is a promise about text it can represent. “It has the alphabet” is not enough when the intended copy also contains curly quotes, currency, fractions, accented names, mathematical symbols, or combining marks. Starting from representative text makes that promise concrete.

The planner works at Unicode code-point level. It keeps a decomposed e plus combining acute distinct from the precomposed é, because a font can map and shape those sequences differently. That distinction is easy to miss when the screen renders both as the same visible grapheme.

Use three kinds of samples

1. Real product copy: navigation, labels, names, prices, dates, and error messages expose the characters a working interface actually uses.
2. Language samples: prose from the languages you plan to claim catches accents, marks, and punctuation that an English pangram will not.
3. Stress strings: deliberately include quotes, dashes, brackets, percentages, currency, and numerals so quiet omissions do not reach the release file.

What the presets do—and do not do

The Starter proof set is intentionally tiny: it helps test proportions before the alphabet becomes expensive to revise. Uppercase display supports short all-cap uses. Basic Latin covers printable ASCII. The Western Latin working set extends that baseline with Latin-1, Latin Extended-A, and common typographic punctuation.

These are planning recipes, not certifications. A range can include characters irrelevant to your audience and still omit language-specific behavior outside the range. Confirm the exact orthographies, shaping needs, and license expectations for the release you describe.