Using Special Characters
I am trying to use the special character 'ȗ' when labelling my maps, but the text tool replaces it with a question mark when I try to add it to my map. Is there a way to set this up so these characters can be recognised? I am new to CC3 and just starting out on this journey.
Comments
Most likely, this is because that character isn't included in the font you're using. When I make a map and put in text in the Bookman Old Style font, for example, and use the alt code for Û, it shows up fine. But when I change the font to Viner Goblin Hand it just returns a blank space, because whoever developed the Goblin Hand font didn't include that character when they wrote it.
Maidhc is right. A lot of these artistic fonts designed by untrained type designers (and particularly the free ones) are missing a good number of characters. They tend to be the ones that are never used in word processing apps.
There is an app called CharIdent that searches through the fonts you have installed for the characters you specify and shows which fonts contain those characters. Very handy. It hasn’t been updated in about 10 years, but seems to still work
https://blog.keyman.com/2011/07/character-identifier-tool/
To add a little bit of additional information, CC3+ uses the ASCII representation for text internally. That means that not only does your font have to have the characters you want be defined in the font, but that the character has to be defined in the first 256 glyph indices. There are lots of fonts out there with all manner of characters defined (hooray Unicode!), but CC3+ will still only access the first 256 glyphs in each font.
I ran into this when I needed an accent mark on an "e" - I ended up using the standard e in the word, then drew a polygon to approximate an appropriate accent mark for the font. Once that was done, I grouped the text and the polygon so it would stay together if I needed to move it. Worked like a champ for a one-off.
Of course, it would be much more of a pain to deal with if your text contains a lot accent marks. YMMV.