# Missing glyphs use Last Resort font

Most fonts do not have 100% character coverage, and will fall back to a
\"not found\" glyph for characters that are not provided. Often, this
glyph will be minimal (e.g., the default DejaVu Sans \"not found\" glyph
is just a rectangle.) Such minimal glyphs provide no context as to the
characters that are missing.

Now, missing glyphs will fall back to the [Last Resort
font](https://github.com/unicode-org/last-resort-font) produced by the
Unicode Consortium. This special-purpose font provides glyphs that
represent types of Unicode characters. These glyphs show a
representative character from the missing Unicode block, and at larger
sizes, more context to help determine which character and font are
needed.

To disable this fallback behaviour, set
`font.enable_last_resort`{.interpreted-text role="rc"} to `False`.

::: {.plot alt="An example of missing glyph behaviour, the first glyph from Bengali script,
second glyph from Hiragana, and the last glyph from the Unicode Private Use
Area. Multiple lines repeat the text with increasing font size from top to
bottom.

text_raw = r\"'\\N{Bengali Digit Zero}\\N{Hiragana Letter A}\\ufdd0'\"
text = eval(text_raw)
sizes = [
(0.85, 8),
(0.80, 10),
(0.75, 12),
(0.70, 16),
(0.63, 20),
(0.55, 24),
(0.45, 32),
(0.30, 48),
(0.10, 64),
]

fig = plt.figure()
fig.text(0.01, 0.90, f'Input: {text_raw}')
for y, size in sizes:
fig.text(0.01, y, f'{size}pt:{text}', fontsize=size)"}
:::