How Many Characters Does a Font Actually Have?

Every font page on this site shows a glyph count, and it is one of the few numbers here that is routinely misread. It is worth knowing what it counts, because it is the difference between a font that will set your text and one that will quietly substitute a different typeface halfway through a word.

Glyphs are not characters

A character is a thing in the text — the letter a. A glyph is a drawing in the font. They are usually one to one and often are not: a font can hold several drawings of the same letter for different contexts, and it can hold one drawing used for several characters.

So a face with 3,000 glyphs may not cover more languages than one with 800. It may simply have small capitals, several sets of numerals, and alternate letterforms — features that are valuable and have nothing to do with coverage.

Where the number comes from here

It is read out of the font file when the archive is built, not copied from a description. So is the list of alphabets on every page — the check looks for the actual characters each script requires and reports what it found. A font is listed as supporting Turkish because the dotless ı and the dotted İ are in the file, not because the family name suggests it. The Turkish post works through why that distinction matters.

The characters that catch people out

• Curly quotes and apostrophes. Straight quotes are basic Latin; the typographic ones are not, and a font missing them silently falls back mid-sentence.
• The en dash, em dash and ellipsis. Same story, and they appear in almost every piece of edited prose.
• Currency symbols beyond the dollar. The euro is usually there; the lira, rupee and won often are not.
• The degree sign, the multiplication sign, and the proper minus — all different characters from the ones on a keyboard.
• Accented capitals. Plenty of fonts carry é and not É, which only shows up in a headline set in title case.

What a missing glyph looks like

Either a rectangle — the "tofu" box — or, more often and more insidiously, the character rendered in a completely different typeface, because the browser fell through to the next family in your stack. The second is easy to miss on a screen and impossible to miss in print.

How to check before you commit

Every font page here has a character map showing exactly what the file contains — look rather than assume. Then set your own worst-case string in the preview: a name with an accent, a price with a currency symbol, a sentence with real punctuation. The Lorem Ipsum tool will do it at the size and measure you actually intend.

Display faces are where this bites hardest. A face like Bebas Neue is drawn for headlines and carries far less than a text face — which is entirely reasonable for what it is, and a problem if you discover it after the brand guidelines are printed.