Unicode Explained

Even if a program recognizes some data as denoting a character, it may well be unable

to

display it since it lacks a glyph for it. Often it will help if the user manually checks

the font settings, perhaps trying to find a rich enough font. Advanced programs could

be expected to do this automatically and even to pick up glyphs from different fonts,

but such expectations are often unrealistic at present. However, it is quite possible that

no such font can be found. As an important detail, the possibility of seeing, for example,

Greek characters on some Windows systems depends on whether “multilingual sup-

port” has been installed.

A well-designed program will in some appropriate way indicate its inability to display

a character. For example, a small rectangular box, the size of a character, could be used

to indicate that there is a character that was recognized but cannot be displayed. Some

programs use a question mark, but this is risky—how is the reader expected to distin-

guish such usage from the real “?” character? Advanced browsers may display a symbol

that indicates the general class (e.g., Latin letter or mathematical symbol) of the char-

acter.

Figure 1-7. Properties of a font (Garamond), as viewed with the Font properties extension

Glyphs and Fonts | 35

Font Embedding

To overcome a situation ...