How can I use unique characters/glyphs in a font for my website?

[tsan]

Hello! After an hour searching online, and another hour in Adobe support hell, I'm still unable to get claification on the following:

My goal is to use unique glyhps/characters in the Typekit provided font, Stratos on my website. These are single glyphs/characters like arrows, hearts, etc. Things you would see in a user interface.

To see an example of Stratos extensive character set I'd like to access, visit the foundry's typeface spec here and scroll to the bottom of the page.

Does anyone know how I can access the extensive characters availble to me on Typekit included in Stratos on my personal website? Googling this has led me down so many dead ends.

Thank you so much for your help!

[Dov Isaacs · Accepted solution]

First of all, Typekit is now Adobe Fonts. 😏

That having been said, although the Stratos fonts available via Adobe Fonts although contain 693 distinct glyph definitions, they are only a subset of the full Stratos complement of glyphs offered in the Stratos fonts available for licensing directly from the font foundry itself. (Those fonts have support for Cyrillic-based languages and many additional symbolic characters.

If you need those additional glyph definitions for your website (or printing), you will need to license the Stratos font(s) directly from the font foundry, Production Type.

             - Dov

[tsan]

Thanks for the clarification, Dov. Can you explain how one can view which characters are available via Adobe Fonts (e.g., which arrow characters can I use)?

[Dov Isaacs]

Regrettably, the Adobe Fonts web pages do not provide a comprehensive list of the available glyphs, just a general set of characterizations of available characters. For your purposes, that is fairly useless.

                 - Dov

[tsan]

Dov, I don't think it's fairly useless to let web developers use glyphs in font families for user interface design. That's just Adobe not acknowledging that designers want extensive glyphs because typeface designers are including them now. For user interaces. I dearly miss Typekit. It had an actual community of people supporting it that loved typography. We're left now with a shell of that company.

[Dov Isaacs]

I don't think you understood what I said. I indicated that the information that was provided on the Adobe Fonts web pages with regards to all the available glyphs for each font is fairly useless. I personally believe that any web page either providing access or selling licenses to a typeface should provide (1) a comprehensive rendition of all fonts available in the typeface and (2) a comprehensive list of all OpenType features supported in the font (such as small caps, old style figures, ligatures (by category), stylistic sets, etc.).

By the way, one method of viewing all available glyphs in a font from Adobe Fonts is to activate a font and then use the glyph palette in InDesign. That will show all the available glyphs in the font. This is not particularly convenient, but it does work.

            - Dov

[tsan]

Hi Dov, thanks for the response. That was more of a personal rant about the seemingly abandonned Adobe Fonts culture that stemmed from Typekit. Glad we see eye to eye on providing detail specifications. If you have any pull, I'd love to see some more robust features around Open Type and Variable Fonts. Would hate to see a service that provides professional typefaces get shortchanged by a lack of updates.