ISO/IEC 9541 specifies the architecture of font resources, as well as the formats for font interchange amongst information processing systems. ISO/IEC 9541 also specifies the architecture and formats that can be used to construct font references in general electronic document interchange.

ISO/IEC 9541-2:2012 specifies the interchange formats for font information, and the minimum subsets of that information required for interchange. ISO/IEC 9541-2:2012 requires the property definitions as defined in ISO/IEC 9541-1.

Font subsets defined by ISO/IEC 9541-2:2012 establish the minimum set of font properties that must occur within an ISO font resource. To accommodate the broad range of document and text processing functions found in office and publishing environments, it is anticipated that ISO font resources will contain more than the minimum number of font properties.

Font resources defined by ISO/IEC 9541-2:2012 are used in various document processing environments in which the RELAX NG Compact Syntax schema (ISO/IEC 19757-2) parsing algorithm is recognized. The format of font resource information as defined in ISO/IEC 9541-2:2012 is specified in RELAX NG Compact Syntax for consistent generation of font resources for use in the processing environments.