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<head>
<title>UK TeX FAQ -- question label misschar</title>
</head><body>
<h3>Where have my characters gone?</h3>
<p/>You&rsquo;ve typed some apparently reasonable text and processed it, but the
result contains no sign of some of the characters you typed.  A likely
reason is that the font you selected just doesn&rsquo;t have a
representation for the character in question.
<p/>For example, if I type &ldquo;that will be &pound;44.00&rdquo; into an ordinary
(La)TeX document, or if I select the font <code>rsfs10</code> (which contains
uppercase letters only) and type pretty much anything, the &pound;
sign, or any lowercase letters or digits will not appear in the
output.  There&rsquo;s no actual error message, either: you have to read the
log file, where you&rsquo;ll find cryptic little messages like
<blockquote>
<pre>
Missing character: There is no ^^a3 in font cmr10!
Missing character: There is no 3 in font rsfs10!
</pre> 

</blockquote><p>
(the former demonstrating my TeX&rsquo;s unwillingness to deal in characters
which have the eighth bit set, while the <code>rsfs10</code> example shows that
TeX will log the actual character in error, if it thinks it&rsquo;s
possible).
<p/>Somewhat more understandable are the diagnostics you may get from
<i>dvips</i> when using the OT1 and T1 versions of
fonts that were supplied in Adobe standard encoding:
<blockquote>
<pre>
dvips: Warning: missing glyph `Delta'
</pre>
</blockquote><p>
The process that generates the metrics for using the fonts generates
an instruction to <i>dvips</i> to produce these diagnostics, so
that their non-appearance in the printed output is less surprising
than it might be.  Quite a few glyphs provided in Knuth&rsquo;s text
encodings and in the Cork encoding are not available in the Adobe
fonts.  In these cases, there <em>is</em> a typeset sign of the
character: <i>dvips</i> produces a black rectangle of whatever
size the concocted font file has specified.
<p/><p>This question on the Web: <a href="http://www.tex.ac.uk/cgi-bin/texfaq2html?label=misschar">http://www.tex.ac.uk/cgi-bin/texfaq2html?label=misschar</a>
</body>