Typefaces may be made in variants for different uses.

These may be issued as separate font files, or the

different characters may be included in the same font file if the font is a modern format such as
OpenType and the application used can support this.[29][30]

Alternative characters are often called stylistic alternates. These may be switched on to allow users
more flexibility to customise the font to suit their needs. The practice is not new: in the 1930s, Gill Sans,
a British design, was sold abroad with alternative characters to make it resemble fonts such as Futura
popular in other countries, while Bembo from the same period has two shapes of "R": one with a
stretched-out leg, matching its fifteenth-century model, and one less-common shorter version.[31] With
modern digital fonts, it is possible to group related alternative characters into stylistic sets, which may
be turned on and off together. For example, in Williams Caslon Text, a revival of the 18th century font
Caslon, the default italic forms have many swashes matching the original design. For a more spare
appearance, these can all be turned off at once by engaging stylistic set 4.[32] Junicode, intended for
academic publishing, uses ss15 to enable a variant form of "e" used in medieval Latin. A corporation
commissioning a modified version of a commercial font for their own use, meanwhile, might request
that their preferred alternates be set to default.

It is common for fonts intended for use in books for young children to use simplified, single-storey forms
of the lowercase letters a and g (sometimes also y and l); these may be called infant or schoolbook
alternates. They are traditionally believed to be easier for children to read and less confusing as they
resemble the forms used in handwriting.[33] Often schoolbook characters are released as a supplement
to popular families such as Akzidenz-Grotesk, Gill Sans and Bembo; a well-known font intended
specifically for school use is Sassoon Sans.[34][35]

Besides alternate characters, in the metal type era The New York Times commissioned custom
condensed single sorts for common long names that might often appear in news headings, such as
"Eisenhower", "Chamberlain" or "Rockefeller".[36]

Digits

Hoefler Text uses text figures as its default digits, providing uppercase or lining figures as an alternative.

Fonts can have multiple kinds of digits, including, as described above, proportional (variable width) and
tabular (fixed width) as well as lining (uppercase height) and text (lowercase height) figures. They may
also include separate shapes for superscript and subscript digits. Professional fonts may include even
more complex settings for typesetting digits, such as digits intended to match the height of small caps.
[37][38] In addition, some fonts such as Adobe’s Acumin and Christian Schwartz’s Neue Haas Grotesk
digitisation offer two heights of lining (uppercase height) figures: one slightly lower than cap height,
intended to blend better into continuous text, and one at exactly the cap height to look better in
combination with capitals for uses such as UK postcodes.[39][40][41][42] With the OpenType format, it
is possible to bundle all these into a single digital font file, but earlier font releases may have only one
type per file.