Started in 1997 and first released in 2006 under the SIL Open Font License (OFL, Charis was developed by SIL International to “provide a single Unicode-based font family that would contain a comprehensive inventory of glyphs needed for almost any Roman- or Cyrillic-based writing system, whether used for phonetic or orthographic needs.” [SIL] The design of the basic character set is derived from Charter, designed by Matthew Carter for Bitstream in 1987.