How to remove unused glyphs from a font

You can remove unused glyphs from a TTF or OTF in Font Studio's workspace Glyphs tab: select the characters to delete, remove them, validate, and export a leaner font — entirely on your device, with the original file untouched.

This matters more than it sounds: fonts from aggregators and old projects often carry whole scripts you never ship. Cyrillic in a Latin-only app, a symbol block you'll never use, half-finished experiments from a previous designer — every unused glyph is dead weight in the file.

Remove vs. subset — pick the right list

Both operations shrink a font by dropping glyphs. The difference is which list you write:

• Removing takes a blocklist — "these characters, gone". Use it when you know specific ranges are dead weight.
• Subsetting takes an allowlist — "keep only these". If you can enumerate what a project actually uses, a subset removes more in one step. See How to reduce font file size for that workflow.

Step 1 — Check what the font actually contains

Open the font and look at its coverage first. The Unicode Explorer shows coverage block by block, so you can see whole ranges you can live without — instead of discovering them glyph by glyph.

Step 2 — Select the glyphs to remove

Switch to the workspace's Glyphs tab. The grid shows every character the font's character map actually contains. Select what goes:

• Tap tiles to toggle them into the selection
• Range — enter a start and end in hex (0400 to 04FF selects a whole Cyrillic block)
• Select All — everything in the current view
• Search — find a character or code point, then select the matches

Step 3 — Remove and confirm

Tap Remove and confirm. The removal lands in the project as an undoable step — the summary tells you how many glyphs went. Two guards protect you: the Remove action stays disabled until something is selected, and an operation that would break the font (removing every glyph, or a composite's base glyph) is refused with an explanation instead of producing a corrupt file.

Step 4 — Validate and export

Run Font Health on the result — a full pass confirms the rewrite left a healthy file. Then export the cleaned font; it saves as a new file, and your original is untouched.

Note Removing glyphs changes the font's character set. If an app or website expects a removed character, it will render a fallback box instead. Keep the original, and check your license permits redistributing modified copies (licensing basics).

What to try next

• Removing a large unused range cuts file size meaningfully; for maximum shrink, pair removal with conversion — How to reduce font file size
• Missing characters instead of extra ones? How to merge two fonts