Its design goal is 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.

"[1] Charis SIL supports Graphite, OpenType, and AAT technologies for advanced rendering features.

Alternatively, customized versions of the fonts can be created with TypeTuner, prior to download, that have those forms preset.

[7] Features that may be chosen include small capitals, primer-style 'a' and 'g', roman-style 'a' and 'g' in italic typeface, variant forms of capital 'Ŋ', large modifier letter apostrophe and Saltillo, Vietnamese-style diacritics, Serbian-style italics (in Cyrillic), staveless tone letters, and automatic fractions.

[6] Phonetician John C. Wells has recommended Charis SIL as an excellent font for displaying IPA symbols.