[luatex] What happens to glyphs not in the font?

[Reinhard Kotucha]

On 2014-03-25 at 11:55:04 +0100, Martin Schröder wrote:

 > 2014-03-24 22:31 GMT+01:00 Arno Trautmann <Arno.Trautmann at gmx.de>:
 > > What happens when I input a character that is not available in
 > > the current font?
 > 
 > I'd expect
 > Missing character: There is no � in font cmr10!
 > (maybe even with an "ß" :)

Well, I wouldn't expect � in error messages.  And I wouldn't expect it
in the TeX world at all.  You certainly know this glyph from web
browsers or Harald's T-shirt ("schei� encoding"). 

I would expect either ß or ^^df, for example, in the log.

Furthermore, if TeX doesn't complain about a missing glyph then it
might be worthwhile to examine the tfm file.  Everything TeX knows
about glyphs of a particular font is in the tfm file.

  man tftopl

There might be a few things one can do wrong with dvips/pdfTeX map
files.  What happens if an entry maps an 8-bit-aware tfm file to a
7-bit font?  At which stage will this error be detected?

Regarding web browsers, I don't think that the glyph � comes from any
font you have installed on your system.  This doesn't make sense.
I suppose that web browsers provide a dedicated font containing this
glyph.  This would be quite similar to Adobe Reader.  It's shipped
with some fonts for internal use too.

Regards,
  Reinhard

-- 
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Reinhard Kotucha                                      Phone: +49-511-3373112
Marschnerstr. 25
30167 Hannover
mailto:reinhard.kotucha at web.de
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