jimbug72 said:
I'm not doubting you but why would they do that?
Because creating alternate characters is a better approach for most kinds of typefaces. OpenType technology allows for that and many other bonuses which enable superior quality typography. Plenty of contemporary fonts made over the past 20 years have taken advantage of the extended features of the OpenType standard.
Prior to OpenType you needed separate fonts for native small caps character sets, alternate characters, swash characters, ligatures, etc all just to cover one weight of a typeface. The same went for other alphabets like Greek and Cyrillic. Now all of that can be rolled up into one font file.
I don't create my sign designs and other graphics for the average layperson who supposedly doesn't care. I have a higher standard. I believe it's my civic duty to do a competent job setting type and other design tasks when the product is going to be something in public view for possibly many years. Considering how so many anti-signs ordinances are being put into effect by city governments across the country I don't want to be one of those guys churning out trash and inspiring those ordinances.
jimbug72 said:
Fair enough. That makes sense. Just because I can't envision the market doesn't mean it doesn't exist or isn't viable.
New commercial fonts don't sell very well unless they pack a lot of extra OpenType features and big character sets. Even the most popular free/open source fonts (such as Montserrat) have extensive features. I recently bought a geometric sans serif OpenType Variable family called Coco Sharp (by Zetafonts). The family has 60 regular OpenType fonts and two OpenType Variable fonts (upright and italic). Each font file has over 2000 glyphs, packed with lots of alternates for capitals and lowercase letters among other OTF features. The variable fonts are unique in that they have an x-height slider that changes the size of lowercase characters in relation to the uppercase glyphs while keeping stroke weights in balance. That stuff is very useful for branding and various kinds of sign design work.