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Missing characters & font substitution
Missing characters & font substitution

Accents & other characters switch to a default font? Here's a fix!

Franz avatar
Written by Franz
Updated over 6 years ago

By default, Illustrator, Photoshop and other apps automatically switch to a default font whenever you type a character that’s missing from the current font.

This occurs with missing capitals/lowercase letters or accented characters (diacritics) - even if they are in the font - as you enter several character keys to type them. 

For instance, to enter the character é (small letter e with acute) you might first press the acute accent ´ and then the lowercase e. If you font does not include the acute accent ´ as a separate glyph, the app will switch to the default font and your accented character é will not be displayed with your font :(   

Hopefully you can solve this in a couple ways:

  • In Adobe apps, disable the substitution by unchecking Preferences > Type > Enable Missing Glyph Protection

  • If you want to keep substitutions enabled, you can also simply select the accented character and reassign your font from the Character Panel ;)

  • Create new glyphs for each accent so your font contains a character for each of the diacritical marks, like the acute accent ´ (you will find the most common ones in the Font Template from the top right menu). 

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