character. I am using the Orbitron font in a hybrid Cordova/Android app that I am creating - quite simply because it is compact and has the clean, futuristic look that I am after. However, I realized not so long ago that Orbitron is a rather limited font with support for little more than the basic latin character set.
I was about to embark on a switch to the Noto * family of fonts that have been created by Google so there is No more Tofu - tofu beign the term used by typographers to describe the blank rectangular box that appears when a font does not have a suitable glyph to display.
Incorporating the Noto Sans, Noto Sans Naksh (Arabic) and Noto Sans CJK (Far Eastern) font families in my app would add to to its size so I decided to do an experiment first in Chrome on Windows (for a while now the WebView used by Android in its hybrid apps is derived from Chrome so the test is fairly representiative.
My test markup is shown below. Even with Orbitron being specified as the default important font Chrome does a perfectly good job of showing the text for "Hello World!" in Spanish (Orbitron does not have the Spanish inverted exclamation mark), Arabic, Simplified Chinese, Japanese & Tamil (all not present in Orbitron).
*{font-family:orbitron !important;}<link href="https://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Orbitron&display=swap" rel="stylesheet">
<div id='english'>Hellá</div>
<div id='spanish'>¡Hola Mundo!</div>
<div id='arabic'>مرحبا بالعالم!</div>
<div id='sch'>你好，世界！</div>
<div id='jp'>こんにちは世界！</div>
<div id='tamil'>வணக்கம் உலகம்!</div>Clearly, Chrome is silently using a reliable fallback here when it finds Tofu in Orbitron. My questions
- Just how does this Tofu substitution occur?
- Is it OK to rely on automatic Tofu substitution or is it advisable to deal with language specific issues with some judicious CSS and a well selected font family instead?
