Latin Extended not working

Edit: I’ve just realised the special characters are only weird in the header and look good in posts.

Hi there!

I am not sure if you saw it, but at the bottom of the “Fonts” section is a “Character Subset” select input. If you choose “Latin Extended”, it will load that font subset. I tested those two characters with your chosen fonts and the “Latin Extended” subset and they appeared correctly for me.

Give that a shot and let us know if it is working for you!

Hi, yes, I’d noticed that right away and selected the Latin Extended subset. That’s why I’m surprised to see it isn’t working for me. Actually, it is working but only in posts, not in the menu (in the header).
(Also, I don’t know if it’s supposed to be like that but when I choose a font for the “Body”, the menu in the header changes to the same font as well. Whereas when I change the font for the “Header”, the font of the menu in the header doesn’t change.)
Can anyone advise me on how to make the extended version of the font work in the menu as well?

Hi there!

So far, I cannot reproduce the issue; however, you might have something different in your setup that triggers the issue. Please tell me the following:

1. What font do you have set for each font option?
2. What character subset do you have set?
3. What text is not displaying correctly?
4. Can I get a link to your site?

Thanks!

Hi,

thank you for your reply. Here are my answers:

1. Site title and headers: Sans Serif (but I don’t have this kind of text on my site, I have a logo instead)
Body: Open Sans (also tried Alegreya Sans) – when Open Sans is chosen, the special characters work in posts but not in the header navigation menu; when Alegreya Sans is chosen, the special characters don’t work anywhere

2. Latin Extended

3. See answer 1 – more specifically it’s the ?, ?, ? characters

4. I don’t feel comfortable posting it here as I’m building my business site and wouldn’t like my potential clients to see the “behind the scenes” of my site so I sent it to your company’s email address, hope that’s OK ??

Hi there!

Thanks for all of the information!

Unfortunately, I am unable to reproduce the issue. The “Latin Extended” option will only apply to Open Sans. This information is needed when generating the font request to Google. The Sans Serif font choice should support Latin Extended as this is just using your computer’s base fonts.

Is it possible for you to share a small screen grab of the issue? Perhaps you are able to show just a small bit that illustrates the problem, but doesn’t identify the site owner.

Hi,
yes, of course, here’s a screenshot of what happens when I set the font to Open Sans – I put a green dot under the characters that are OK and a red dot under those that are weird.
https://grab.by/xCqI

And here’s a screenshot of what I get when I choose Alegreya Sans.
https://grab.by/xCqS

I also experimented with some other Google fonts to see if the problem occurs with all Google fonts or just some of them. Here’s a screenshot of the same page using Luckiest Guy which works just fine (but at the same time is not a font that I would like to use for my site).
https://grab.by/xCr0

Hi again!

Thanks for the screenshots!

Forgive me for my ignorance, but it seems like the characters marked with the red dot are identical to the ones with the green dot. Am I missing something? I am not familiar with these characters, so there is a good chance that there is a subtle nuance that I am missing.

I took a screenshot showing Menu and Body text using the “Sans Serif” option. Is there an issue with this:

I then took a screenshot of showing Menu and Body text using the “Luckiest Guy” option. How does this look?

Thanks for bearing with me as we work through this. It’s a really tricky issue that we want to get right.

Hi, I think I wasn’t clear enough in my description of the problem, I’m sorry.

As you said, the characters are the same, they are legible and form the words that they should form. The problem is that they don’t look the same as the rest of the letters. They look as if they were written using a different font (I guess if the system can’t find “?” in the chosen font it replaces it with a “?” from a different font).

Compare “?” and “s”, “?” and “c” or “?” and “z” in my first two screenshots. “?” should look the same as “c” except for having a little “arrow” (I don’t know what the name of the sign is in English) above it but it doesn’t. If you look at the letter “c” in ?u?oriedka and the letter “c” in Cenník (both words are in the header navigation menu) in my first two screenshots, you’ll notice that it has a different shape and is bolder in the word ?u?oriedka which doesn’t look good.

On the other hand, if you compare the same words in my Luckiest Guy screenshot you’ll notice that all the “c” letters are exactly the same whether they have an “arrow” above them or not.

Hope this helps ??

Hi, I took a screenshot of exactly the same words written using exactly the same font (Open Sans Condensed) on the Google fonts website and on my website using your theme. I think it makes the problem clearer than all the talk in my previous post ??
https://grab.by/xEN2

To be clear, the difference is that the menu items have bold first letters? It also looks like they are a little shorter.

I cannot seem to reproduce this effect. Have you added any CSS that might cause this issue? It almost seems like something is targeting those first letters specifically.

Hello butterandjam!

This is an odd issue. I do not know exactly why you’ve hit this. It’s possible the sans-serif font stack isn’t suitable in your case. Instead, can you please try setting all of your font options to Open Sans?

Let us know if this helps ??

Hi Zack, hi Scott,

the difference is that the characters ?, ?, ? (but also ň, ?, ? which I currently don’t have in my navigation menu) are not from the same font as the rest of the characters. When I choose Open Sans (or Alegreya and many other Google fonts) my text changes to Open Sans but the characters ?, ?, ? etc. don’t change to Open Sans, they change to some kind of basic font (Arial probably). I know you might not notice the difference when Open Sans is used because the difference is subtle (but still visible and disturbing to me) as both Open Sans and the other font (Arial?) are sans serif fonts. But take a look at this example – I used the font Griffy for this and also changed the page titles to nonsense words in order to be able to use more of the ?’s, ?’s, ?’s so that the problem is more visible.
https://grab.by/xH3a

In the screenshot, you can clearly see the difference between what the special characters should look like in the chosen font and what they actually look like on my website. You can also see that it’s not about first letters, it’s about the characters from the Latin Extended subset.

I haven’t changed anything in the code, I’m only using the customizer to customize my website (one of the reasons I love your theme is that there are so many options in the customizer that I don’t have to deal with the code).

Scott, I tried setting all of the options to Open Sans, nothing changed.

However, I tried something else and I guess I might be on the right track. You know how somebody sends you a document using a font that is not installed on your computer and the software you want to open it in warns you and tells you it is going to replace the missing font with a different font from your computer which normally messes up the layout of the document? Well, I thought the problem on my website might be similar.

So I checked the fonts on my computer for Open Sans and Alegreya and found out they weren’t there. So I downloaded both fonts from Google fonts and installed them on my computer. And now when I set the font on my website to Open Sans or Alegreya they both work, the characters from the Latin Extended subset change to Open Sans or Alegreya as well which is great.

But this means that my website will only look good on computers which have my chosen font installed on them. I find it strange since the Google fonts website tells you you don’t have to download the fonts in order to use them on your website.

Do you think you could fix this? I know nothing about computers but could it be that the problem is the place where the fonts are loaded from? I also found this thread – I don’t really understand what they did there (but you surely will) but they solved the problem so maybe this is similar.

If all fails, I’m going to stick with one of the standard fonts but it would be really nice to have more possibilities than that ??

Sorry, I forgot to include the link to the thread I was talking about in my previous post. Here it is:
https://www.ads-software.com/support/topic/web-font-type-latin-extended?replies=5

Hi there!

Sorry for the long response time. This thread got buried in a couple other ones.

The biggest issue with “fixing this” right now is that Scott and I simply cannot reproduce it ?? We can definitely see that something is happening on your computer, but we just cannot reproduce it.

Have you tried reproducing it on another computer? Is it possible to open up the site temporarily so we can take a closer look?