Fonts are “the clothes that words wear,” said early 20th-century editor Beatrice Warde.
And just like our clothing, the font you choose says much about your personality.
Many writers use the default options. For a long time this was Times New Roman, later switching to Calibri and Cambria. Some authors prefer to write in Courier New for its ‘typewritery’ feel. But what about typesetters and E-Book creators?
When designing printed material, there are a myriad of typefaces out there to play with. Each one gives your book, leaflet or magazine a different feel.
The problem comes when the typeface you’ve selected is incomplete. Meaning it doesn’t have a full and comprehensive character set.
Let’s say you’ve chosen a font called Spectral. Unbeknownst to you, it doesn’t have an apostrophe or a diacritical like ą or ø. For printed materials, this isn’t a problem as the designer or typesetter can manually set a substitute typeface for that particular character.
But what happens when that same material gets digitised into an E-Book or for the web? The webpage, or eReader has nothing to work with, so it goes to a default and produces a character that’s not part of the font package. Sometimes it just renders a square.
If you’re lucky, this default will be similar enough to pass, but if you’re not – say your text is in a serifed font like Suranna and your device’s default is Arial – you’ll get a mismatched, mis-sized character in the middle of your text. Disaster!
3 ways to fix a missing character in your chosen typeface.
- We know it’s obvious, but try and ensure that you’re using a font package that has all the characters you need. This will save you hassle.
- Substitute the font out for as near identical one as you can find that does have all the needed characters; fonts like Times New Roman, Georgia, Calibri and Arial have a pretty comprehensive list.
- Your typesetter can add a simple extra command to the CSS.
Instead of:
font-family: “Suranna”;
