Accents, symbols and characters that go missing
Every character you type is a request. The typeface either has a drawing for it or it does not, and when it does not, something has to happen instead.
This failure gets past everyone, because a screen is more forgiving than a book. Your computer has hundreds of fonts and will quietly borrow from any of them to show you a character. A print PDF embeds the faces the book actually uses, and nothing else. The character your screen found somewhere has nowhere to come from.
What a missing character looks like
There are three outcomes, in descending order of how likely you are to catch it.
- A box. An empty rectangle, sometimes with the character's hex code inside it. This is the honest failure and the easy one, because nobody ships a page with boxes on it.
- Nothing at all. The character is dropped and the line closes up. Zoë becomes Zo, and unless you know the name, it reads as a word.
- A substituted letter in a different face. The renderer finds the character in some other font and sets it there. The word is correct and one letter is in the wrong typeface — a different weight, a different width, sitting slightly off the baseline. On screen it is invisible. In print it is a blemish on a name that appears ninety times.
The third is the dangerous one. It does not look like an error, so it survives every check that consists of scrolling and squinting.
The categories that break most often
- Accented Latin letters. é, ñ, ü, å, ø, ç, ł, ș. Names, loan words, place names, anything with a diaeresis. Good book faces carry these; display and novelty faces frequently do not.
- Greek and Cyrillic. A single Greek letter in a math passage, a Russian name in the original, a phrase in a character's first language. Most Latin book faces contain none of these.
- Math and currency symbols. ×, ÷, ≈, ≤, °, ±, †, ‡, §, and currencies beyond the dollar sign — €, £, ¥, ₹. Coverage varies face by face with no pattern you can predict.
- Arrows and dingbats. →, ★, ✓, ♦, and the marks people borrow as scene-break dividers. Very few text faces have them.
- Emoji. Effectively no book typeface contains emoji. They are color images in a separate font your book will not embed. If one is in the manuscript — in a text message inside a scene, most often — replace it with words or with a real typographic mark.
The silent substitution
Fallback is the mechanism behind that third failure, and it explains why the problem stays invisible until it is printed.
When a renderer meets a character the current font lacks, it does not stop. It searches every font available and sets the character from the first one that has it. On your machine that search almost always succeeds, and the result looks fine.
The book does not have hundreds of fonts. It has the ones embedded in the file. So the question is never "does this character display on my computer" — it is "does this character exist in the face this book is set in".
In the Interior Formatter. It embeds the fonts into the print PDF, so what the file carries is what the printer sets — no borrowing from whatever happens to be installed. All six body faces — Crimson Text, Gentium Book Plus, Spectral, EB Garamond, Lora, Alegreya — carry full Latin character sets, accents included. Start a book → · about the Interior Formatter
The check that takes ten minutes
You cannot read 90,000 words looking for one wrong letter. You can find every candidate and check that short list.
Make an inventory. Search for anything outside plain English — accented letters, symbols, anything you had to insert rather than type. Most word processors search for a specific character; a find-and-replace of é with é reports how many there are. Work down what you know is in the book: names with accents, place names, units, currency, any symbol used as a divider.
Then confirm each one survives. Export, set the book, and look at those exact words at print size — not at the whole page, at the word. Zoom in far enough to see the letterforms. A substituted glyph gives itself away by weight and by baseline.
Do this before the proof, not after. A proof copy is the right place to catch layout problems. It is an expensive place to discover that one name has been set in the wrong face since chapter three.
Quotes and dashes are special characters too
The marks in Punctuation that typesets badly — typographic quotes, the en dash, the em dash, the ellipsis — are not plain ASCII. They depend on encoding and font coverage exactly as an accented letter does.
Which is why they are the most common casualty of a bad export. A file saved through the wrong encoding turns every curly quote into a pair of mismatched symbols — the ’ garbage you have seen on badly built web pages — and it does it to thousands of characters at once. Plain-text exports strip them back to straight quotes. Some conversion tools replace an em dash with a hyphen.
The check is the same: after you export, search the new file for a straight ", a straight ', and a double hyphen. If they turn up and they were not there before, the export did it.
Ebooks are a different problem
A print PDF carries its fonts. An EPUB often does not, and a reading device may substitute any face it has for the one you chose — so the question becomes "does the reader's font have this character", and you cannot know the answer.
Two things follow. Use characters with wide support: accented Latin, common currency and common math symbols are safe, and anything exotic is not. And where a book genuinely needs an unusual script — Greek in the epigraphs, a Cyrillic name throughout — embed a font that carries it, and accept that you are choosing coverage over a preferred face.
An image of a character is the last resort. It will not scale with the reader's type size, it will not reflow, and a screen reader cannot read it without alt text. See EPUB and print PDF are two different books.
The rule underneath all of this is short. A character exists in your book only if the font in your book has it. Everything else is your computer being helpful in a way the printer will not be.
Make yours
Everything here is built into the tools, and they are free to use: name your book, bring your manuscript or your artwork, and work as long as you like. You only pay when you want the files without the preview watermark.
Next: Punctuation that typesets badly · Also: Choosing a typeface for the body of a book · Preparing a manuscript that typesets cleanly · EPUB and print PDF are two different books