por Imagine having all the elements of a brand already developed and ready to take to distribution and, when you start writing in the font you have chosen, you realize that the ñ is not there. This can be a big problem, because realizing that there are no special characters in typography means having to start over from scratch to look for a new font when you already had everything ready. In this post, we show you what special characters are in typography and the languages for typography.
What are special characters in typography
Special characters are all those characters that are outside the traditional Latin alphabet. However, special characters vary depending on the language in which they are to be applied.
Not all fonts contain special characters, so it is very important to know what language you are working in to find a suitable font.
Special characters in typography
Within special characters in typography In Spanish in particular there are accents. Very few fonts come with the ability to create accents, letters like ñ that are often a problem with Romance languages, since most of these contain special characters, like in Portuguese the ç or in French the accent â. All the characters that you can imagine outside of the traditional alphabet (by traditional we mean the American alphabet) are characters that you should take into account.
Also You have to pay attention to whether you have chosen a font with symbols, such as the registered trademark, punctuation marks, etc., since these are also special characters in typography. If you are going to use them, it is very important to take them into account.
How do I know if my font has it?
Many of the pages for choosing fonts have different ways to filter the information and in most of them you can find, below the chosen font, the characters that come in that package. In Google Fonts, for example, there is the option to filter directly by languages and they will only show you the languages you want to use.
On pages like DaFont, each of the fonts or typography comes with a character map where all characters per packet are displayed.
First it shows you the traditional alphabet and if it has numbers of typography; Following this, it shows you the symbols that are part of the typography.
Afterwards, too shows you if it contains special characters in the typography or if you should look for another.
This particular font does have all the characters, but if the typography does not have The special character will show some squares with a cross in the center. These indicate that the font does not have those special character symbols.
What happens if I use a font that doesn’t have the special characters in the typography?
If you don’t choose a font that has a special character, it can become a nightmare or have a simple solution depending on the medium it is in.
If you are running a campaign in analog media, it is not that complicated. Usually people usually make the character in Illustrator and export the words you need in different formats to just paste them where the error is. This changes a bit when used in a digital medium.
On a web page you must set up the complete typography so that the search engine can read it and show it the right way. If your font does not have special characters, it will not be legible. You can imagine that your client probably doesn’t like this happening on their website. Not just because it looks awfully bad, but rather it takes away the seriousness of the page with this special character. A square can also appear when it does not appear, like the one we have shown above, although The most common thing is that the web browser looks for the first operating system font that has the special character and puts it in order to display it.
Correct special characters
If your client gives you a font that does not initially have the characters you need, you should know that there are options to fix them, although this should be the last resort, since doing so is not that easy.
There are ways to directly edit the typography and create them in the font file opentype. It is a very tedious process and usually very few people do it, so it is advisable to have the typography from the first source selected.
Do you want to learn more?
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