I think the basic version should contain all the characters you want to have, and the pro version contains only additional ligatures/alternates/swashes. I tend to refer to math/science terms fairly often, so having Greek available standard is important to me—I don't see it as an advanced feature.

Personally, I feel every digital typeface ought to have at least heart and smiley even if there are no other dingbats. (Gotta ♥ the ☺s.) But I happen to really enjoy creating dingbats so maybe it's just me.

CT

Thanks Christ, so your vision is to use Basic and Pro not for more lenguages but for more open type features. That's interesting!

To me writing system support should not be related to Basic/Pro/etc.

hhp

Thanks Hrant,

Now, sometimes you design a typeface for Latin and you start selling it... let's say vía myfonts.
After a few months you decide to design the Cyrilic/Greek characters. What do you do? Do you create a new version that has greek/cyrilic and sell them separately? or just update the font you already have in MyFonts? Should it be more expensive?

In terms of such "business decisions" I do have some ideas, but I actually have more to learn than teach, so I'm all ears myself! I hope Nick Shinn chimes in, since he's considered this issue and "experimented" with it for a few years. I'll ping him.

hhp

@Hrant: To me writing system support should not be related to Basic/Pro/etc.

I would like to agree, but if one is publishing Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic versions of a typeface, the standard practice is to not label the Latin as such, eg:

Pentimento
Pentimento Greek
Pentimento Cyrillic
Pentimento PE (Pan-European)

If I named a font “Pentimento Latin”, those in my primary (99%) market (Latin) would be perplexed and put off licensing it, because most people think “Latin” refers to the ancient language, not the present day writing system.

So I presently favor the above system, with “Pro” describing fonts with OpenType features.

BTW, check how foundries such as TypeTogether, Rosetta, Parachute do this -- as well as companies such as Adobe, Microsoft, Apple and Linotype -- and of course FontFont, who really upset the apple cart.

Thanks for posting.

What about the various options of bundling scripts together, and relative pricing?

About FontFont: what do you mean?

hhp

Thanks Nick & Hrant! :)

This really helps. Yes, I've been investigating about this last weekend. I started to really concern myself about the encodings when talking with a friend from TypeTogether they are really tidy about it.

PS: Didn't understood FontFont/Apple problem

Just a historical quibble: "Expert" came from the PostScript Type 1 days, where encoding was by PostScript name, not Unicode. And given the hard-wired encoding of Mac & Windows, the so-called "expert sets" of the time had most characters mis-encoded (i.e., mis-named).

To this day, when I see a font advertised as having "expert" characters, I just assume it's screwed up. You might not want to have "expert" and "encoding" in the same blurb/sentence.

Interesting. Do you think the perception that "expert" means screwed-up is widespread?

hhp

I wouldn't call them screwed up except from a usage standpoint, but they are fixable. Outdated would be a better term for the existing fonts. The word "pro" seems to be in wider use for a lot of products today.

And Nick, tell us more about FontFont and the apple cart. Or would that be Apple cart?

I concur with the mal-use of "Expert". This used to be an indicator that the font contained Small Caps, Oldstyle Numerals, and a smattering of ligatures. In those days only "fi" and "fl" appeared in 'normal' fonts; the rest had to be replaced manually. A tedious and error prone process (so the term "Expert" may not have designated the font, but rather the level of experience needed to use it correctly).

These days, I expect these extras in what has become known as "Pro" fonts. Adobe makes a clear distinction: its Type 1 fonts that were converted to the OTF format, but did not magically gain (lots of) ligatures or other OT features, are called "Std". Those that do -- irrespective of the number of scripts --, are called "Pro".

I wouldn't call them screwed up except from a usage standpoint

You know, actually, they were. Standard PostScript was set up by Adobe, and Adobe had a glyph list of proper names for all characters. Not as useful as Unicode's numbers, perhaps, but at least a Standard.

But if you remember, the OS systems for Windows and Mac had a hard-wired encoding, so to get a character that wasn't in *their* (different) list, you had to give it the wrong name. Those of us who set type out of a DOS box weren't so limited, but we were few.

When you start lying about encodings, everything becomes font-dependent. Sad thing is about half the presses we work for today still think that way, and some still stick to their old Type 1 fonts with mal-named characters. Just how many ways can you lie about what Greek character goes where, about which font had an omacron character in the odieresis slot (so the damn *characters* would change if you changed fonts...)

I call it screwed up, and if we're talking about *fonts* rather than *typefaces* I think relevant.

Edit:

To address the original question (malformed or no), I think Nick is about right. These days, languages covered is the big question, the goodies are just assumed, and can be shown as cute little OT icons where the font is sold.