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Many unicode characters show up as little squares

I've been doing a fair bit of research on various scripts, and am realizing that many alphabets and abugidas aren't recognized on my computer (mid 2015 MBP, Sierra 10.12.6), instead showing up as blanks squares. This includes some fairly widely-used scripts such as Burmese or Tifinagh (screenshot attached). These don't show up on any browser, nor when pasted into Word. Is there a way around this very frustrating issue?

MacBook Pro 15″, OS X 10.10

Posted on Jun 8, 2020 8:14 AM

Top-ranking reply

Tom Gewecke

Level 10

118,418 points

Posted on Jun 8, 2020 8:32 AM

What shows up depends entirely on the fonts installed on your machine. Apple does not provide fonts for all characters of all scripts. One place to get more is

https://www.google.com/get/noto/

In the example you gave, for example, Noto Sans Myanmar should put characters in place of the squares.

Symbola is another font with characters which are hard to find elsewhere. Also Babelstone fonts.

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Many unicode characters show up as little squares

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