Charis is similar to Bitstream Charter, one of the first fonts designed
specifically for laser printers. It is highly readable and holds up
well in less-than-ideal reproduction environments. It also has a full
set of styles - regular, italic, bold, bold italic - and so is more
useful in general publishing than Doulos SIL. Charis is a serif,
proportionally-spaced font optimized for readability in long printed
documents.

The goal for this product was 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. In addition, there is provision for
other characters and symbols useful to linguists. This font makes use
of state-of-the-art font technologies to support complex typographic
issues, such as the need to position arbitrary combinations of base
glyphs and diacritics optimally.