…is an essay I wrote in 2020 about font fallback and all these mysterious “missing character” characters like �.

If you are curious, too, you might find it interesting! It was fun researching this, and I ended up going in unexpected directions, including emoji and “Unicode fonts.” The essay pairs nicely with text.makeup, as that’s the tool that can help you investigate a suspicious string to see what exactly happened.

(The writing is on Figma’s blog, but it doesn’t talk about Figma-specific typography – as a matter of fact, it’s deliberately kept universal, with Figma behaviour only mentioned in one sentence.)