Pro edition
Character Set.
672 drawings across ten blocks, the six OpenType features that ship, and the six things that go wrong between a font file and a rendered page — none of which are the type designer’s fault and all of which are the type designer’s problem.
By block
| Block | Glyphs | What is in it |
|---|---|---|
| Basic Latin | 95 | ASCII. Every font has it and it is 20% of the work. |
| Latin-1 Supplement | 96 | Western European accents. The point at which a font becomes usable outside English. |
| Latin Extended-A | 128 | Central and Eastern European. Polish ł, Czech háček, Hungarian double acute, Turkish dotless ı. |
| Latin Extended-B (part) | 42 | Romanian comma-below among others. Partial because the block is enormous and most of it is unused. |
| Vietnamese | 134 | Stacked diacritics. Bellrope Sans only, and the single largest decision in the family. |
| Punctuation and marks | 61 | Including both dashes, guillemets, and the case-sensitive alternates. |
| Figures, four sets | 40 | Lining, oldstyle, tabular, proportional. Ten drawings each and they are not scalable copies of one another. |
| Currency | 18 | Including ₺, ₴ and ₹, which date a font faster than anything else in it. |
| Maths and misc | 34 | Real minus, real multiply, and fractions drawn rather than assembled. |
| Ligatures and alternates | 24 | fi, fl, ffi, ffl and the case-sensitive forms. |
Features, and what they silently change
| Feature | State | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| liga | By default | Standard ligatures. Off in a code editor, which is why Quire Mono ships with them disabled in the font rather than expecting the app to do it. |
| locl | By default | Language-aware forms. Turkish i keeps its dot in caps, Romanian gets the comma below. Silently wrong in every application that does not set a language. |
| tnum | On request | Tabular figures. Turn it on in any table of numbers and the columns line up; leave it off and they do not, which is the single commonest typographic bug in web applications. |
| onum | On request | Oldstyle figures. Right in running text, wrong in a table, and the choice is the writer’s rather than the designer’s. |
| case | On request | Case-sensitive forms. Raises hyphens, parentheses and guillemets beside capitals. Nobody turns it on and everybody should. |
| ss01 | On request | A single-storey a in Bellrope Sans. Exists because an interface client asked; kept because it is genuinely better at 11 px. |
Six things that go wrong after delivery
Every one of these gets reported as a bug in the typeface, and none of them is one.
- The subset drops the accentsA build tool subsets to “latin” and Polish disappears. The font is fine; the pipeline threw the glyphs away. Check a built page, not the source file.
- No lang attributeWithout lang="ro" the locl feature never fires and Romanian silently gets a cedilla. One attribute, and it is missing on most multilingual sites.
- The fallback stack is wrongA missing glyph falls back to whatever is next in the stack, which is a different design at a different size. It looks like a bug in the font.
- Variable axes clampedA weight of 450 requested from a static 400/700 pair renders as 400. Nothing errors and the page is subtly wrong everywhere.
- Faux bold and faux italicThe browser synthesises them when the weight or style is not loaded. It is always visible and it is always blamed on the typeface.
- Hinting on WindowsThe one platform difference that still matters at small sizes. Test on it, or find out from a client on it.