[XeTeX] Guaranteed Unicode replacement glyph in every TeX installation?

Doug McKenna doug at mathemaesthetics.com
Sat Aug 21 17:25:14 CEST 2021


Thanks all for your interesting responses. 

Unfortunately, my possibly poorly worded question remains unanswered. Let me try again. 

Consider the short example just used: 

\documentclass{article} 
\usepackage{fontspec} 
\setmainfont{DejaVu Serif} 

\begin{document} 
^^^^fffd 
\end{document} 

When I run it, fontspec complains that it can't find the font. So obviously "DejaVu Serif" is not installed, either on my system or anywhere in the bowels of all the ~150,000 TeXLive (2019) files that have been installed in the TDS on my machine. 

So, is there a font name I can use in the \setmainfont{} command that is ALWAYS available (upon TeX installation) when processing this LaTeX file with XeTeX? Or always available after a certain version of a TeX installation? 

I want to automatedly create such a LaTeX file that permits its user to declare or override a default font for typesetting the Unicode Replacement character, but which doesn't require the user to search for or declare such fonts at all in the simplest case. One would think that every OpenType font supporting Unicode glyphs would include a glyph for U+FFFD, but it doesn't appear to me that that is the case. 

All I want is for the computer-generated LaTeX file "to just work" out of the box (so to speak), so that a naive user isn't faced with an error message the first time they typeset it with something like TeXShop. 

Doug McKenna 
Mathemaesthetics, Inc. 


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