If I get preflight errors in Affinity Publisher of, "Missing characters," but the characters seem to display properly, what am I being warned about?

[AntiqueFlaneur]

I'm using some asian characters in my text. They seem to display properly, but as you can see in the screenshot below, it tags them with preflight errors. What is Publisher trying to tell me?

[GarryP]

Publisher’s Help file says “Missing characters—appears when text uses a marking glyph that is not present in the currently applied font.” although, somewhat unhelpfully, it doesn’t say what a “marking glyph” is or what you can do about it. (A quick web search for “marking glyph” didn’t yield any further details.)
Have you tried hovering your mouse pointer over one of those warnings to see if it gives any further information?

[Alfred]

The 亩 character seems to display properly, but perhaps it’s from a different font. The ǔ  in ‘mǔ’, on the other hand, looks much too small.

I think ‘marking glyph’ in this context simply means that a visible glyph appears on the page. Please see:

https://blogs.adobe.com/typblography/2013/03/introducing-adobe-blank.html

[Furry]

I am getting the “Missing charaters” warning yet, when I go through the page character by character, they are all standard roman alphnumeric characters and the entire page is written in English. Publisher gives me no hint as to WHICH characters are missing, nor how to fix the problem. Yes, I can click on “Ignore and continue” but why should I have to?

[carl123]

6 minutes ago, Furry said:

I am getting the “Missing charaters” warning yet, when I go through the page character by character, they are all standard roman alphnumeric characters and the entire page is written in English. Publisher gives me no hint as to WHICH characters are missing, nor how to fix the problem. Yes, I can click on “Ignore and continue” but why should I have to?

 

[Furry]

Thanks for your prompt reply, carl123, but that thread is entirely concerned with charaters from another language. I am getting this message with standard fonts (Optima and Palatino) using standard English spelling and punctuation. and I still have no clue as to how to solve the problem.

[carl123]

Can you copy the page (or text frame) that contains the error to another document and upload it to the forum?

[Furry]

13 minutes ago, carl123 said:

Can you copy the page (or text frame) that contains the error to another document and upload it to the forum?

Sure. The .afpub file is attached. When I created this one-page file (the only page that was returning the error message) it still returns the error message so, hopefully, you can help me.

Missing characters.afpub

[carl123]

I don't have all your fonts but the error message seems to relate to the 4 characters shown below

Not sure what you see on your screen but if you delete them the error message should disappear 

 

[Furry]

Thank you, carl123. Absolutely nothing is showing in that space on my page. When I placed my cursor at the right hand end of  the line above (the one ending with “M A L L”) and then tapped the right arrow key on my keyboard, the cursor simply moved to just before the “W” in the main title line. It is as if there is nothing there at all.

However, when I copied those two paragraphs and then pasted them into an .rtf empty doc (using TextEdit), four rectangles showed up. I deleted them, copied the remaining and pasted that back into .afpub, then re-applied the appropriate paragraph styles. Now when I ask it to print, at last there is no warning. All fixed.

But I am hanged if I know where those four characters came from or even what they might be!

And I am sorry about Boris. But I don't know that our lot in Australia are any better.

[R C-R]

13 hours ago, Furry said:

Absolutely nothing is showing in that space on my page.

Same for me on my Mac.

[kenmcd]

15 hours ago, Furry said:

But I am hanged if I know where those four characters came from or even what they might be!

They appear to be 001A Substitute - which is an old control character from ASCI which is in Unicode for compatibility. It was used (among other things) to show missing characters in the old ASCI fonts (like FFFE is now used in Unicode fonts). Apparently it was also used to show end of text blocks and some other uses.

Where did this text originally come from?
Did it get cut-and-pasted from some old doc, or imported, or?

[Furry]

The .afpub doc is a reconstruction of an InDesign doc which, because it had a huge table running over several pages, did not translate well through .idml. The text of this front page would have been copied and pasted. Those four characters do not show in InDesign.

[kenmcd]

On 1/13/2022 at 2:58 PM, Furry said:

Those four characters do not show in InDesign.

They should not show here either. Those old command codes have no glyph (usually) and no width - so nothing should appear. 

It appears Affinity is replacing it with the Unicode missing character glyph - which is why it shows.

All those old command codes should probably just be stripped-out. At a minimum not be replaced with a visible character (which appears to be what ID is doing).

[Furry]

They don't show, either in InDesign or in Affinity Publisher. Carl123 got them to show somehow in his screen shot and, when I copied and pasted to TextEdit, they showed there. My first indication that they even existed was in the Preflight warning. I would be happy to strip them out but, until they show or I get a warning about their (invisible) existence, I know nothing about them.

[thomaso]

On 1/13/2022 at 8:09 PM, R C-R said:

On 1/13/2022 at 6:55 AM, Furry said:

Absolutely nothing is showing in that space on my page.

Same for me on my Mac.

Here, with the font installed, the glyphs are not literally showing as visible chars or blueish 'special characters', too, but I notice them as zero-width items: If I place the text cursor right behind the first capital W and use the left arrow key then the first keys stroke moves the cursor in front of W and then it takes 5 times to move the cursor to the end of the first line, while on the way the font name gets displayed starting with an exclamation mark as ! Optima, indicating by the !  the missing issue.

[Furry]

Thanks for your comment, thomaso. Since I have now delete them from my .afpub file and have deleted rthe former .indd file, there is no way I can check out your suggestion. Where does the exclamation mark show? .afpub or .indd? I assumer, whichever app, it is in the list of available fonts.

[thomaso]

In Apub the exclamation mark occurs for missing glyphs (question mark for missing fonts) in the font entry for the currently assigned/selected font (not in the menu list, which shows available fonts only). In ID a missing font is indicated by an assigned font name in [brackets] + rose highlightet text, missing glyphs aren't indicated in the font name but as highlightet text only.

Edited January 15, 2022 by thomaso
marks for font vs glyph corrected

[Furry]

Thanks, thomaso. I am fairly familiar with InDesign, having used it daily for the last 20+ years, but am still very much a newby with Publisher. I presume by “the font entry for the currently assigned/selected font” you mean in the paragraph style edit panel?

[thomaso]

Every UI item where the font can be assigned, aside the Text Style Editor window it is also in the Context toolbar and the Character panel. The tooltip calls this field "Font Family".

I just noticed, it appears a missing font is indicated by a question mark … whereas missing glyphs cause the exclamation mark.

…

[Furry]

Thanks for that tip.