Glyphs different in Character Viewer vs. TextEdit

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Level 1

7 points

Glyphs different in Character Viewer vs. TextEdit

Hi there.

I'm trying to troubleshoot a problem with the display of glyphs. When using apps like TextEdit or Scrivener, certain glyphs are not represented correctly as per what they look like in Character Viewer.

These same glyphs display correctly in other apps (Word, Affinity Photo, Terminal...).

Here are the glyphs not working right in TextEdit:

This is what they should look like (from OneNote, but other apps are fine):

Character Viewer displays them correctly. It is only TextEdit and Scrivener with the problem. I'd write it off as a Scrivener problem except for the problem in TextEdit, which is a basic system app. I have confirmed this across two OS X installations / devices, so it's not constrained to a single machine (which may imply it's not a corrupted font cache or similar).

I've previously had this working under an earlier OS X (same software worked fine) with these particular glyphs.

Any thoughts about how I can get this working correctly? It doesn't seem to be font related (any font has the same problem).

MacBook Pro (Retina, 15-inch, Mid 2014), macOS Sierra (10.12.4)

Posted on Apr 24, 2017 1:16 PM

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Answer 1

Kurt Lang

Level 9

68,626 points

Apr 24, 2017 1:53 PM in response to Morbific

Check to make sure you're using the same font(s) in both apps. In the lower image, both quarter moon glyphs shown are from Menlo. Wingdings 2 also has left and right outlined quarter moons, but have heavier lines. So I'd say they're from Menlo.

The other two I can't say. I have very few fonts active on my system. Lots of them have various outline diamond shapes, and I don't see any fonts with that solid quarter moon of those I do have active.

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Answer 2

Kurt Lang

Level 9

68,626 points

Apr 24, 2017 3:20 PM in response to Morbific

but it looks like TextEdit is helpfully substituting some fonts (in this case, .SF Compact Display)

Interesting that you were even able to choose that font (or did the OS itself do that?). With the proceeding period in the name, it's not supposed to appear anywhere. Just as the rest of the Sans Francisco set is not supposed to be visible in any app. Apple intentionally hides those.

(e.g., Word agrees that it's Georgia, yet displays correctly)

Word does that a lot. If you type a font that has no glyphs in the Unicode position for the keys you pressed, it will instantly switch to something else. Usually, Calibri, or whatever you've made the default font for your Normal template. As an example, I chose Apple Color Emoji from the font menu and randomly typed a few letters. It immediately went to Calibri. I selected the text and chose Apple Color Emoji again. It then stayed, but was meaningless. It displayed this:

Which isn't even possible since the emoji font has no standard English alpha glyphs in it. Only space, #, * and the numerals 0-9.

Dingbats tend to particularly be a problem going from one app to the next. Especially if one works strictly in Unicode (where everything is headed) and the other looks for glyphs by their decimal position (such as glyph number 282, with zero being the first glyph in the array).

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Answer 3

Morbific Author

Level 1

7 points

Apr 24, 2017 1:52 PM in response to Kurt Lang

You might be on to something. I've been forcing the fonts to be all e.g. Georgia, but it looks like TextEdit is helpfully substituting some fonts (in this case, .SF Compact Display) for some of the glyphs. That is, I was using the same font by selecting the text and changing the font, but the apps were ignoring that selection and substituting a variant.

This is not as helpful as it might seem 🙂

I'll try using a different font and see how I get on. What's totally weird, right, is that some apps work fine with the fonts set as described (e.g., Word agrees that it's Georgia, yet displays correctly). This is a little confusing and difficult to understand what behaviours are at play behind that.

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Answer 4

Morbific Author

Level 1

7 points

Apr 24, 2017 3:26 PM in response to Kurt Lang

Interesting that you were even able to choose that font (or did the OS itself do that?).

The OS did it itself. As I moved the cursor over the substituted characters it then changed the font dialogue at the top in TextEdit to show the font it was displaying.

It looks like in the case of Scrivener (where this challenge first appeared for me), the app wants to use Helvetica (system font?) for one field. When I paste in the glyphs, it does the font substitution (no doubt because Helvetica lacks the glyphs) but it's not easy to see what fonts are being used in that app. TextEdit makes this a little more visible.

Still not a great set of solutions though as while I now know (kind of) what's going on, I don't have a super good fix for Scrivener's Separators field, except for a bit of try-and-see with various glyphs in that field. Character Viewer provides a list of which fonts contain similar symbols (great!) but I still need to root around inside the symbols to see what Helvetica can give me.

This is (another reason) why I drink.

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