Missing glyphs from some fonts

Question

Some international fonts (such as Devanagari and others in that area) are apparently missing some glyphs.

Checking the lower left of wikipedia I get squares ("missing glyph symbol"), and going into that site I get only squares too; however, checking in other sites it appears many glyphs are there, but a few are missing.

What can I do to fix this? What could be the problem?

Answer 1

Now I've upgraded to 10.10 and it works.

I also upgraded to 10.8 before that, but I didn't notice if it was already fixed or not.

Answer 2

This is like asking "Why is my dictionary missing some words?"

Just like no dictionary contains every possible word, no font contains every possible unicode glyph. Remember that someone has to actually create the font, and they aren't going to spend the time to get every possible glyph from every possible language. Especially when the number of glyphs defined is always increasing.

From wikipedia:

No single "Unicode font" includes all the characters defined in the present revision of ISO 10646 (Unicode) standard, as it is continually adding more & more languages and characters. As a result, font developers and foundries are also incorporating those new characters in newer version or revision of a font, and correcting their previous errors if there were any.

If you are interested, you can see on Wikipedia a comparison of some common Unicode fonts together with the code blocks that they cover.

You might try installing Gnu unifont, which seems to have the most complete coverage. To install, just download the font from the site, click on the file, which opens a font preview in FontBook. Just click "install" and you are done.

Answer 3

The solution is simple: Install fonts that have those characters or force your browser (or viewer) to use fonts, that have those characters.

Use Font Book application to check what fonts (installed) have it by simply changing the Preview text (Preview->Custom) and then scrolling trough the fonts.