Will it show
as boxes?
Paste your fancy text and see which characters may turn into empty boxes, character by character.
Paste your fancy text and see which characters may turn into empty boxes, character by character.
Result
Paste some text to see which characters may turn into boxes.
| System | Characters with no glyph |
|---|
What these labels mean
- Safe: a glyph exists in the system fonts of every system we measured: Windows 10 and Android 8, 10, 12 and the latest Android source.
- Mostly safe: the glyph exists, but the character can turn into a colour emoji, is a combining mark, or some systems have no glyph for it.
- May show boxes: at least one measured system has no glyph for this character.
- No data: we only measured the characters used by our styles and symbols. Other characters, such as Arabic, Hebrew or Chinese, Japanese and Korean letters, are not rated and cannot be checked here. We do not guess.
- iPhones and iPads were not measured, because Apple does not publish which characters its fonts cover.
What the checker reads
An empty box appears when a device has no font with a picture for a character. We measured this directly. For Android 8, 10, 12 and the latest source we read the font files named in Android's own font list (a few files could not be downloaded and are listed in our notes), and for Windows 10 we read the stock fonts. Every character of our styles and symbols was looked up in those files. A separate test in Chrome on Windows 10 drew 2,110 of these characters on a canvas, and the boxes it found matched our measurement exactly.
The checker reports four things: characters that are safe, characters that are mostly safe, characters that may show boxes, and characters we have no data for. Arabic, Hebrew and Chinese, Japanese or Korean text falls in the last group: the checker cannot say if it is safe.
What it cannot tell you
It does not cover iPhones or iPads, because Apple does not publish which characters its fonts cover. It does not cover Samsung or Xiaomi skins, which keep the same fallback fonts but may change the main letters. It does not test how an app draws marks or emoji. And a character that we did not measure is counted as no data, which is not the same as safe.
When a character is at risk we suggest the plain letter if there is one. For more about a style, open the cute fonts list, where each style carries the same label. The tables for every style and symbol group, with the method and the test date, are on the Unicode font compatibility data page.
Questions
Why do some of my characters say no data?
We only measured the characters used by our styles and symbols. Others are not in our tables, so we cannot check them here. That is not the same as safe.
Does it check iPhone?
No. Apple does not publish per-character coverage, so we could not measure it.
What does mostly safe mean?
The glyph exists, but the character can turn into a colour emoji, or it is a combining mark that apps stack in different ways.
Is my text sent to a server?
No. The check runs in your browser against a small table of characters.