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Font coverage and glyph fallback

Not every character can be drawn by every font. This page explains what the built-in PDF fonts can encode, why an unexpected ? sometimes appears, and the three ways to render the symbol you actually wanted.

WinAnsi and the base-14 fonts

The built-in fonts — HELVETICA, TIMES, COURIER and their bold / italic variants — use WinAnsi encoding. WinAnsi covers Latin-1 plus a handful of typographic extras (curly quotes, en / em dashes, the bullet •, the euro sign, trademark, …) — roughly 220 characters. Anything outside that set has no glyph in these fonts.

A frequent surprise: the bullet • (U+2022) is in WinAnsi, but the larger black circle ● (U+25CF) is not. They look similar, so a skill-rating row written with ●●●●○ silently loses its dots, while one written with • keeps them.

Symbol Code point In WinAnsi?
• bullet U+2022 yes
– en dash / — em dash U+2013 / U+2014 yes
“ ” ‘ ’ curly quotes U+2018–U+201D yes
● black circle U+25CF no
→ ▶ ✓ ★ arrows / ticks / stars U+2190+ no
emoji U+1F300+ no

What GraphCompose does with an unencodable character

It does not crash. At render time PdfFont.sanitizeForRender substitutes any code point the resolved font cannot encode with ?, keeping the width measurement and the bytes emitted in lockstep (so wrapping never drifts). A stray ? in your output is the signal that a character fell outside the font's coverage.

Three ways to get the symbol you wanted

1. Draw it as geometry (recommended for shapes)

Dots, arrows, chevrons, diamonds, stars, checkmarks and checkboxes are shapes, not text — render them from geometry with inline-shape runs and the font's coverage stops mattering:

document.pageFlow()
        .addParagraph(p -> p.rich(rich -> rich
                .style("Java ", bodyStyle)
                .dot(7, accent).dot(7, accent).dot(7, accent)         // ● ● ● — always render
                .dot(7, DocumentColor.WHITE, DocumentStroke.of(accent, 1.0))))  // ○ outlined ring
        .build();

See the Inline shapes example for the full set (dot, arrow, chevron, diamond, star, checkmark, checkbox).

2. Use a font that covers the range

FontName.JETBRAINS_MONO is bundled for monospaced code and data. For broader Unicode coverage, register a custom font family that includes the glyphs you need and select it through DocumentTextStyle.fontName(...).

3. Stay inside WinAnsi

For simple lists, prefer the characters the base fonts already have — • instead of ●, - or – instead of an arrow.

See also