Originally published on eve.gd on 28 July 2013, last updated 6 September 2026.
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I've just spent the past hour grappling with getting FOP to render the Unicode glyph for a checkmark (U+2713) in PDF output from XSL:FO. I thought I'd share a few things I learnt along the way (that make me feel a bit silly for not knowing them already).
The type of errors I was getting were:
Glyph "✓" (0x2713, checkmark) not available in font "Times-Roman".
Some observations after messing around for far too long:
1. Fop does not support fallback to a secondary font on a character-by-character basis. If you need a glyph to be rendered that isn't present in your font, well, bad luck. (Unless you specifically tweak your XSL:FO document, which isn't viable in my case.)
2. There is no way, as far as I can see, that you can map a specific character to use a different font.
3. There is a great resource at fileformat.info that will tell you what fonts support your glyphs.
4. Just use DejaVu Sans and save yourself a lot of tweaking.
great resource at fileformat.info
tell you what fonts support your glyphs
This reference list has been generated, in many cases, through an automated process and may therefore contain errors or incomplete metadata. It is provided purely as assistance for finding the items mentioned within this post.
1. ‘CHECK MARK (U+2713) Font Support’, FileFormat.Info <http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/2713/fontsupport.htm>
2. FileFormat.Info: The Digital Rosetta Stone <http://www.fileformat.info>
http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/2713/fontsupport.htm
http://www.fileformat.info
Martin Paul Eve
Professor of Literature, Technology and Publishing
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Crossref Member Practices feedback: without digital preservation, there is no digital persistence
Not now, ancient sheep virus found hiding in medieval parchment!
Things I have made (KC IDMS in place, Lower Decks conference, and quote in ResearchProfessional)
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Janeway is pleased to announce a new collaboration with PLOS to develop and extend the Janeway codebase for use in parts of PLOS’s article submission process https://www.openlibhums.org/news/1025/
We've gone from Andy and me coding Janeway by hand, in those pre-AI days, over a weekend or so, to Janeway, a solid structure for OA journal publication workflows. Now being used and developed by a major scientific publisher.
I never had aspirations for it like this. I just wanted it to do what we needed it to do. If there is a cool way for other organisations to make it do what they need, too, so long as it does not violate our ethical principles, then that is fantastic.
https://www.openlibhums.org/news/1025/
14 October 2026, 11:27
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