Windows – Why some unicode characters are missing in charmap

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In Windows, Character Map doesn't seem to display all of the unicode characters, even if the selected font supports them, and "Character set" selector is "Unicode".

For example, the small envelope U+2709 ✉ is never displayed, even if the character exists both in Segoe UI and in Consolas (at least Visual Studio (Consolas) and a sample web page (Segoe UI) displayed in Google Chrome show both the character correctly).

When typing 2709 in "Go to Unicode", this redirects to U+2776 ❶.

Why some unicode characters are missing from charmap?

Best Answer

Are you sure the characters are in the font?

Browsers search other fonts to find missing characters - therefor you cant use browsers to test font contents.

You can't trust applications either - here I am using an Arabic font in Notepad to show Chinese characters that I strongly suspect are not in the Arabic font. It seems to me the application (or the underlying Windows libraries) are searching other fonts to provide the missing character.

screenshot of Notepad showing mixed languages

If you need an independent corroboration, you could try FontForge or another third-party font tool.

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