
The disappointing state of Unicode fonts  - wglb
http://www.johndcook.com/blog/2010/01/16/disappointing-state-of-unicode-fonts/
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makecheck
There are things that programs can do to deal with this, but unfortunately the
work-arounds come at the expense of runtime performance and code complexity.

For example, a program could use a different font to pull in missing
characters. But this can take a lot of extra effort to render properly; if the
typography system doesn't have the concept of font substitution (or even if it
does), then your layout slows down while you figure out how to place the
substitute glyphs.

Another option is reinterpretation: trying really hard to display an
approximation of an unsupported character, instead of garbage (this could be
done using the characters that are actually in the font, or it could be done
by drawing manually). The idea here is to make it as easy as possible for the
user to read what was intended. For instance, Unicode probably has a dozen
characters that look like an ASCII minus-sign; it is kind of silly to ever
display garbage for a character as simple as a horizontal line, as long as
some line-like rendering is available.

