ISO/IEC 9541 defines a method of naming glyphs and glyph collections, independent of any document encoding technique; it assumes that one or more methods of associating document encoding techniques with glyph identifiers used in font resources will be provided by text processing systems.

ISO/IEC 9541-1:2012 specifies the architecture of a font resource, i.e. the font description, font metrics, glyph description and glyph metrics properties required for font references and the interchange of font resources.