Find a font that has specific glyph

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A long time ago I had a tab open that explained how to find a font that contained a specific glyph, but it’s been lost to too many updates. Who knows how to use InDesign to find a font that has a specific (semi-obscure, an asterism) glyph?

M

Manan JoshiCorrect answer

Community Expert

@detritus books ok, in that case you can do a trick. Paste the glyph in a textframe and select it. Then open up the font dropdown from the toolbar. Every font entry should show the character preview if it is supported by that font. You can quickly scan the whole font list visually to find all the fonts that support and don’t support the selected glyph

-Manan

MerMaiden

Participating Frequently

I am translating a book into Spanish, and the glyphs are complicated to find. It's a children's book and the more simple hand written fonts don’t have glyphs. I don’t want to copy and paste an entire accented word over 30 pages

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Joel Cherney

Community Expert

You shouldn’t have to copy and paste accented glyphs! Spanish input should be very easy to set up at the operating system level, in both macOS and Windows. (If you’re in Windows, then I suggest adding the US International keyboard; it adds combining accents you can e.g. just type an apostrophe followed by the e to key in é. There is something similar for macOS, but I do not remember all the details - it’s something like option-n followed by n for ñ, option-e followed by a vowel to write a grave accent over a vowel.)

Unfortunately, there aren’t too many good suggestions I can make for finding good matches for hand-written fonts that have your necessary complement of accented characters. Back when I was doing a lot of Vietnamese curriculum work, I got good at editing fonts really fast. These days, you can use Adobe Fonts to search for all fonts that support Spanish and are classified as handwritten, which strikes me as a better resource than I had back in the days of rapid editing of VNI fonts.

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MerMaiden

Participating Frequently

THANK you so so much for the response. I actually did just that! and it worked out. I appreciate it … 😁

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David W. Goodrich

Participating Frequently

I've had problems logging in to add comments, and when I tried a month ago the post was declined. What I wrote then was "Andrew West’s splendid BabelMap, where the Fonts/Font Coverage tool can list any installed fonts containing a specific code point or all the chars. in a pasted-in text snippet."

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D

detritus booksAuthor

Inspiring

Ooh, how do I get this tool???

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Joel Cherney

Community Expert

Hi, David, nice to see you around here again!

@detritus books , you might not have seen my response as it’s buried under the “more replies” link, but you can get BabelMap from Andrew’s site:https://babelstone.co.uk/Software/BabelMap.html .

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