Cannot find a way to show unicode glyph for "Crossing Lanes" in InDesign. What am I doing wrong?

Question

Hi, I'm trying to insert the specific X that is the unicode glyph for "Crossing Lanes" (U+26CC, https://www.compart.com/en/unicode/U+26CC) into an InDesign file on a Mac, and I cannot for the life of me find out how. I have tried using Unicode Hex Input, holding option, and typing 2600 and 26CC. No luck. I've tried opening the glyph window in InDesign and searching by name and unicode number. I've tried many, many different fonts, and I've googled which fonts have the most unicode characters without finding one that includes Crossing Lanes.

The strange thing is, this glyph shows up normally in Chrome (I write in Google Docs), just fine.

What am I doing wrong? Any tips? Thanks so much!

James Gifford—NitroPress · Answer

There are many thousands of Unicode glyphs, and I don't think there's any single font that has them all. It's just a facet of having this massive, standardized font map. A font that has, say, all the architectural symbols might not include all street map symbols, etc.

There's a font called Symbola, I think, that may come close to having all Unicode glyphs.

This all works seamlessly in environments like Google (and, I'd bet, Word) because these are "systemic" apps that draw from the whole ecology, such as reaching over to another font to pull in a rare glyph. ID doesn't work that way; you have to provide it with the specific language font set, or symbol, or Unicode glyph.

There are several web sites that do Unicode lookup by font. Look one up (heh) and bookmark it for future glyph-ologizing. 🙂

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