Will my accents and special characters print?
A typeface only contains the characters its designer drew. Ask it for one it doesn't have and you get a blank box — □ — where the letter should be. It's not a bug in the formatter, and it's not something the tool can invent its way around.
For most books this never comes up. For a book with a Hawaiian word, a Czech name, a line of Greek, or a check mark in a list, it decides which typeface you can use.
What's safe everywhere
All six body faces cover the accented Latin you'd meet in European languages and names — é, ñ, ø, å, ç, ü, æ, ł, š, č, ā and the other macron vowels — plus curly quotes, em dashes, ellipses, daggers, degree signs, fractions, the euro, and the section mark. If your book's unusual characters are in that group, pick your typeface on how it looks and stop reading here.
What varies
Measured on the actual font files shipped with the formatter:
| Crimson Text | Gentium | Spectral | EB Garamond | Lora | Alegreya | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| ʻ okina (U+02BB) | no | yes | yes | yes | yes | yes |
| ✓ check mark | no | yes | yes | no | no | no |
| → arrow | yes | yes | yes | yes | no | yes |
| Greek (α) | no | yes | no | yes | no | yes |
| Cyrillic (а) | no | yes | yes | yes | yes | yes |
| ❧ fleuron | yes | no | no | yes | no | no |
| Characters in total | 675 | 2,783 | 878 | 2,091 | 778 | 1,254 |
Gentium Book Plus has by far the widest coverage of the six, and EB Garamond is second. Crimson Text is the narrowest — which matters because Crimson is the body face of both the Literary and Classic styles, the two most people reach for first.
A worked example: a novel using the Hawaiian ʻokina and a check mark can be set in Gentium or Spectral, and in nothing else here. That rules out Literary and Classic, and it isn't a taste question — the alternative is boxes on the page.
How to check your own book
- Export the free watermarked proof in the style you want.
- Open it in any PDF reader and search for the character. The PDF holds real text, so if the search finds it, the character is genuinely there.
- Then look at it on the page, at full size.
Do this before you spend time on anything else, because the answer can change your style choice — and changing the typeface re-breaks and re-paginates the whole book.
If a character is missing
- Switch the body typeface. Everything else about the style stays. See Can I change the font or page-number placement?
- Or replace the character. A straight apostrophe in place of an ʻokina is wrong; the word "yes" in place of a check mark is often fine. Your call, book by book.
- Don't paste in an image of the character. It won't match the surrounding type, and it won't be searchable or readable to a screen reader.
The ebook is different
An EPUB uses the reader's font, not yours, so coverage there depends on their device. Modern e-readers handle far more than any single print face. A character that boxes in your PDF may look perfectly fine in the EPUB — check both.