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Here is how U+261E (manicule) and U+00B6 (pilcrow) are displayed in Pages:

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As you can see, all the U+261E and U+00B6 glyphs looks pretty the same across Menlo, Monaco and Courier New (with the exception of pilcrow in Courier New) and across Helvetica Neue and Gill Sans, and for this reason it is not clear to me whether these glyphs are really from their respective fonts or macOS has "borrowed" them from some another font or from multiple fonts (a technique which is known as font substitution).

How I can verify it?

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2 Answers 2

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Selecting a character in Pages or TextEdit should show the font being used in the font window.

You can also open Character Viewer and find each of these and then look at the Font Variation panel at bottom right and you can see exactly how each font displays it.

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  • Thanks, this works. The 1st way is not really convenient, though, and the second, whereas it is more practical, is somewhat ad-hoc. If there are "better" solutions, it will be great to know about them. Or maybe it it possible to disable font substitution instead somehow.
    – user480875
    Commented Feb 22, 2023 at 13:51
  • @jsx97 For web pages there's an extension WhatFont whatfont.en.softonic.com
    – Tom Gewecke
    Commented Feb 22, 2023 at 15:38
  • @jsx97 I don't think you can disable font substitution in general, but some apps probably don't support it and show a square or question mark instead. Is there a particular reason you would want such behavior?
    – Tom Gewecke
    Commented Feb 22, 2023 at 17:20
  • One such an app is Adobe InDesign. The reason why I prefer such behavior is that I prefer to have clear understanding which fonts are really used in each document.
    – user480875
    Commented Feb 24, 2023 at 16:04
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Font Book will show you what glyphs are contained in any given font. Double-click on an individual typeface (e.g. Regular), and it will show you all the glyphs under the "Repertoire" section.

Clicking on a glyph will show you its Unicode value.

Third-party software, such as PopChar, can provide a better interface and more features for viewing and selecting glyphs within a font.

You are right, however, that macOS does have a 'fall-back' substitution for missing glyphs.

From what I can see, Menlo is the only font in your list that includes U+261E. So macOS is providing different replacements, perhaps based on serif, sans, fixed width. All the fonts contain U+00B6.

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  • An important note: Despite Font Book is intended to test fonts and it gives us an opportunity to enter arbitrary characters to see how they appear, it does not disable font substitution.
    – user480875
    Commented Feb 24, 2023 at 16:10
  • @jsx97 Yes, I don't think there's a way to disable the character substitution.
    – benwiggy
    Commented Feb 24, 2023 at 16:21

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