What is the best practice for font versioning?

Using Fonts
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I recently learned that fonts with version numbers below 1.005 are often treated as beta versions by Microsoft apps and might not be displayed for that reason. That means that releasing font with Version 1.000 would not be recommended. This made me wonder: what are the best practices for assigning version numbers to a font during development and once released?

I saw what Rosalie Wagner recommends to not regard the version numbers in terms of major, minor, and patch, but as release, stage, and reviews, making the release version for example Version 1.300. Here’s her talk on this for reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5aIYHYX4Dvc

Are there other established approaches?

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I find Rosalie’s described approach the most rigorous, but honestly, it just comes down to personal preference. I’ve had people that publish each new version as 2.000, 3.000 etc., and other who just increment the third Nachkommastelle (literally “after comma digit”, what’s the word in English?) for every single new version.

Personally, I adhere to the principle of starting at 1.005 for release versions, incrementing to 1.006, 1.007 for each new version. Major updates (script extensions, style additions, major reviews) will bump it to 2.000 and so on.

tl;dr: do what makes most sense to you and just keep the 1.005 rule in mind.

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How boring would type engineering be without having to gather such entertaining side quests bit by bit

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Thanks for this thread; I wasn’t aware of the 1.005 ‘limitation’ either! I have lots of commercial fonts that say version 1.000 – is this something Microsoft have introduced in recent years? Or perhaps the opposite, something they used to do but don’t do anymore?

A decimal or decimal place. :slight_smile:

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That makes sense. Thanks for the clarification! :slightly_smiling_face:

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The source of this statement. Interesting, I never heard about it.

Screenshot 2025-06-13 at 2.04.18 AM
Screenshot 2025-06-13 at 2.04.18 AM804×243 20 KB

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I was looking for the source yesterday but couldn’t find it anymore. So thank you for sharing it! I think it’s really useful knowledge for everyone :slight_smile:

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I believe the 1.005 is not current information anymore. I could not trigger a difference in treatment by MS apps when I last tested this (a couple of yers ago). Perhaps it makes sense as your own internal reference, but I think it makes no difference for the apps anymore (except in FontValidator).

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