Typing accented character changes font

For who wants to know: got the answer at the Adobe forum:

Illustrator is too smart.

Arial contains a separate acute character, and I bet your EuroComic does not. Illustrator tries to 'protect the stupid user' by automatically changing the font because it thinks you are trying to insert a character that is unavailable in the current font. (You are, but only for a short while.)

Go to Preferences, Type, and un-check "Enable Missing Glyph Protection" to fix this.

Actually, it does have an é in it. I've always used it when I was still using Snow Leopard the same way, by pressing option-e + e. And that always gave an é. Now it still gives an é but in Illustrator it turns into Myriad Pro, in TextEdit Lucinda and in Pages it still works normally giving an é in Eurocomic. Also, when I use option-e plus e and get an é in Myriad Pro, I can select the entire text, make it Eurocomic besides all text now being Eurocomic again, that é turns into the Eurocomic é too. So it's in the right place.

Yes, I checked. It's the only one. Funnily enought, I just learned about that holding the e key to get a popup menu where I can select accented characters, but that doesn't work for me. It's just repeating e characters in Illustrator.

In Illustrator CS6 when I type option-e (without even typing the e after it to get an é), it already turns from EuroComic to Myriad Pro. In TextEdit it turns into Lucinda, in Pages, Indesign, Photoshop CS6 and the entire CS3 it stays EuroComic. And I know the é character is at it's right place cause when I type é in Eurocomic it turns into MyriadPro é, but I can select the text, turn it into EuroComic and it becomes EuroComic é again. Will email you the font. Perhaps you can tell if there's an issue with it which could make certain programs act funny that way.

Yes, that's the same what I'm getting. And it's not global: the accented characters work fine in the entire CS3 package and ik Indesign CS6 and Photoshop CS6 and in Pages amongst others. I'm getting the same thing in TextEdit as you. In Illustrator I fixed it by unchecking that missing glyph protection. Which I use it most for anyway. But it is strange. It's like don't recognize the 'missing glyph' (which isn't really missing) and instead turn it into a é of a font which does have that glyph. A font designer would have to make sense of that. Some setting in a font which makes some problems think there isn't such an accented character while in fact it is there at the right spot? I guess the behaviour would make sense when there wasn't a é character: the mac/software wants to add an é, doesn't find it and instead places an é in a font which does have that character. That would happen with fonts which doesn't have such characters. But here these characters are present in EuroComic, but the mac/software thinks it isn't. Perhaps there is some setting in a font which stands for something like "this font only contains a-z A-Z characters"?

On other thing I've learned is that it not so much the é character which it thinks is missing but the single acute accent ' character. When typing option+e it first looks for that single acute accent, doesn't find it in EuroComic and initially thinks é is missing and regards it as a missing glyph all together. Of course é is present in EuroComic, but at first it isn't looking for é, but first for the single accent. Deactivating the missing glyph option fixes that. But the same goes for TextEdit. Upon pressing option+e it first searches for the single accent character, doesn't find it in EuroComic and replaces it with a font that does have it. By the time it realises that the single accent character is missing but the é character is present it is already too late. I guess when the font designer had also added that single acute accent in the glyphs that problem would have been fixed all together.

Yes, they are, but I don't know for sure, but in Illustrator, while watching the Glyphs pallette, I've noticed that while in Arial for example the & ' ( characters have the following U codes: U0026, U0027, U0028, in EuroComic the same sequence of characters have the U codes U0026, U2019, U0028. Maybe Illustrator and TextEdit is expecting the acute character to have a U code of U0027 by default, isn't finding U0027 (since in EuroComic it is coded U2019) and while the acute is there is regarding it as not present? Just guessing, but that's the difference I've noticed.

Ah, ok, in my font viewer too I've noticed. I was looking at the Glyphs window in Illustrator were it showed as U2019. Still there seems to be something inside the font which makes Illustrator/TextEdit not recognize the acute accent. Maybe someone using Fontlab Studio e.g. could explain wat it is?