Font substitution is the process of using one
typeface
A typeface (or font family) is the design of lettering that can include variations in size, weight (e.g. bold), slope (e.g. italic), width (e.g. condensed), and so on. Each of these variations of the typeface is a font.
There are thousands o ...
in place of another when the intended typeface either is not available or does not contain
glyphs for the required
characters
Character or Characters may refer to:
Arts, entertainment, and media Literature
* ''Character'' (novel), a 1936 Dutch novel by Ferdinand Bordewijk
* ''Characters'' (Theophrastus), a classical Greek set of character sketches attributed to The ...
.
Font substitution can be aided by:
* classifying fonts into
generic font families, such that for example a
sans serif
In typography and lettering, a sans-serif, sans serif, gothic, or simply sans letterform is one that does not have extending features called "serifs" at the end of strokes. Sans-serif typefaces tend to have less stroke width variation than ser ...
font is substituted by another sans serif font.
* font substitutions defined in operating system's font configuration for concrete font names (font families), such that for example
Arial font is substituted by metric-compatible font
Liberation Sans or
Nimbus Sans L.
* font substitutions defined in application software's (e.g. text processor) font configuration for concrete font names.
When font substitution is being used to find a replacement for an unavailable character, it can lead to inconsistent visual appearance as part of a word or sentence is displayed in one font and another part is displayed in the substituted font. A method to work around this problem is to display the entire word or paragraph in the substituted font. Nevertheless, font substitution may be critical to scripts not well supported by a large font inventory having the required Unicode range.
Examples of systems that perform font substitution include
fontconfig
Fontconfig (or fontconfig) is a free software program library designed to provide configuration, enumeration and substitution of fonts to other programs. Fontconfig was originally written and maintained by Keith Packard, and is currently maintai ...
,
Adobe Reader
Adobe Acrobat is a family of application software and Web services developed by Adobe Inc. to view, create, manipulate, print and manage Portable Document Format (PDF) files.
The family comprises Acrobat Reader (formerly Reader), Acrobat (former ...
,
Unidrv,
Microsoft Word
Microsoft Word is a word processor, word processing software developed by Microsoft. It was first released on October 25, 1983, under the name ''Multi-Tool Word'' for Xenix systems. Subsequent versions were later written for several other pla ...
(since Word 2002),
Libre Office and
OpenOffice.org
OpenOffice.org (OOo), commonly known as OpenOffice, is a discontinued open-source office suite. Active successor projects include LibreOffice (the most actively developed), Apache OpenOffice, Collabora Online (enterprise ready LibreOffice) a ...
.
Not all systems that claim to offer font substitution are able to substitute for missing characters; some are only capable of substituting for missing fonts.
Major modern
web browser
A web browser is application software for accessing websites. When a user requests a web page from a particular website, the browser retrieves its files from a web server and then displays the page on the user's screen. Browsers are used o ...
s are capable of font substitution.
See also
*
Fallback font
*
Web typography
References
External links
Description of font substitution in fontconfig
Substitution
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