The XCharter is a serif font family, an extensions of the Charter fonts, adding oldstyle figures, superior figures and small caps in all styles. The original Charter fonts were created by famed font designer Matthew Carter in the late 1980’s to enhance legibility of the output from printers of that era (laser, dot matrix, thermal and inkjet) with resolutions that would now be considered low—not far from modern screen resolutions. Their low contrasts, high x-heights and use of piecewise linear outlines where possible may make them interesting again as fonts that will render well on small devices and perhaps projected slides.
There is a new collection of Cyrillic glyphs in XCharter, copied from Andrey Panov’s Khartiya, an extension of the free Charter fonts, with small caps included. Some new figure styles were also copied from Khartiya—inferiors, numerators and denominators. Along with these additions, there are now slanted versions for those who wish to have both slanted and italic text available to meet distinct semantic purposes.
