- Font substitution
Font substitution is the process of using one font in place of another when the intended font either is not available or does not contain
glyph s for the required characters.Font substitution is aided by classifying fonts into families, such that for example a
sans serif font is substituted by another sans serif font.When font substitution is being used to find a replacement for an unavailable character, it can lead to inconsistent visual appearance as part of a word or sentence is displayed in one font and another part is displayed in the substituted font. A method to work around this problem is to display the entire word or paragraph in the substituted font. Nevertheless, font substitution may be critical to scripts not well supported by a large font inventory having the required Unicode range.
Examples of systems that perform font substitution include
fontconfig ,Adobe Reader ,Unidrv , andMicrosoft Word (since Word 2002). Not all systems that claim to offer font substitution are able to substitute for missing characters; some are only capable of substituting for missing fonts.Major modern
web browser s, are capable of font substitution (with the exception of versions ofInternet Explorer older than version 7).External links
* [http://library.gnome.org/admin/system-admin-guide/2.22/fontconfig-4.html.en Description of font substitution in fontconfig]
* [http://www.mozilla.org/projects/intl/fonts.html Mozilla on the utility of font switching]
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