Features of good fonts
There are notable differences in the quality of fonts. This is due to several reasons.
A fundamental one is that the original font creators have been dead for a long time, and fonts have been digitalized. In order to avoid problems with copyright laws, these replicated fonts were partly modified and renamed.
Another problem is that special characters, which are rarely used but do belong to a font, were often left out for reasons of expense. Totay, there's an immense number of fonts, but the majority is "incomplete". In most cases, they are not as minute and thus not as beautiful as the original fonts.
Replicated fonts often don't have optimal kerning, i.e. not all characters are placed exactly on the baseline etc. You see, there are good reasons to buy a good font, even though it may cost a little extra.
However, tihs is frequently the case: When you buy a font, most times you have to rely on the scanty information of the font designers. Before purchasing a font, you usually don't know whether a font features all the necessary details or not.
Here's an example of the character range that a font should have:
- lower case characters (minuscules)
- upper case characters (capital letters, majuscules)
- diacritical marks (acute, grave, cedilla, apostrophe, caret, caron, tilde, ring, trema, breve, horn, macron, ogonek...)
- numeric characters (lining figures, old-style figures / text figures, fraction figures)
- ligatures
- punctuation
- special characters
- small capitals