Missing glyphs use Last Resort font

Most fonts do not have 100% character coverage, and will fall back to a "not found" glyph for characters that are not provided. Often, this glyph will be minimal (e.g., the default DejaVu Sans "not found" glyph is just a rectangle.) Such minimal glyphs provide no context as to the characters that are missing.

Now, missing glyphs will fall back to the Last Resort font produced by the Unicode Consortium. This special-purpose font provides glyphs that represent types of Unicode characters. These glyphs show a representative character from the missing Unicode block, and at larger sizes, more context to help determine which character and font are needed.

To disable this fallback behaviour, set rcParams["font.enable_last_resort"] (default: True) to False.

(Source code, 2x.png, png)