Many unicode characters show up as little squares

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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

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Answer 1

Best reply

Tom Gewecke

Level 10

116,802 points

Jun 8, 2020 8:32 AM in response to sebastopolgoose

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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Answer 2

Jun 8, 2020 8:51 AM in response to Tom Gewecke

This worked. Thanks!

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Many unicode characters show up as little squares

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