If a few letters on your website look heavier or thinner than the rest of a word, your brand font on your website is probably missing those characters and the browser is filling the gap with a system font. It happens most with accented and macron letters such as é and ō, and on any page with Chinese text, because most Latin brand fonts do not contain those glyphs. The fix is to confirm which letters are missing, then supply them from a font whose licence allows web use, loaded only for those characters so nothing else on the page changes. At xCreative™, a Melbourne branding and web design studio in Chadstone, we run this check on every site where the brand name or menu uses characters outside plain English.
How we found it on Rōnin Ōmakase
Rōnin Ōmakase is a ten-seat Korean fusion omakase on Little Collins Street. We named and branded the restaurant and still manage its website. In October 2026 a screenshot came back to us: the Ō in Ōmakase, in the title of the site’s chat window, did not match the letters beside it.
We tested the four weights of the commercial typeface the site uses. None of them contained ō or Ō. Every macron vowel on the site, from headings down to the footer, was being drawn by the visitor’s own system font. The logo was never affected, because it is artwork rather than typed text. The problem only showed where the name was typed into the page, which on a restaurant site is almost everywhere.
A web font is a file with a fixed set of glyphs. When a page asks for a character the file does not have, the browser does not leave a gap. It moves down the list of fonts named in the site’s CSS and, if none of them has the letter, uses whatever the operating system provides, as MDN’s font-family reference describes. That is why the same word can look different on an iPhone and on a Windows laptop, and why it is easy to miss on the designer’s own screen.
Fonts licensed for English often stop at basic Latin plus common Western European accents. Macron vowels, used in romanised Japanese and in te reo Māori, sit outside that set, as do Vietnamese tone marks. Chinese is a different scale altogether: web.dev’s font guidance notes that Latin fonts usually hold 100 to 1,000 glyphs, while Chinese, Japanese and Korean fonts can hold more than 10,000.
How we test a brand font before launch
Looking at the page and hoping someone spots a heavier letter is not a test. This is the routine we now follow when we build or take over a site:
- List every word the business will type on the site that uses a character outside plain English: the brand name first, then dish and product names.
- Test the web font files the site actually loads, not the desktop files the designer used. Web files are often trimmed to a smaller character set.
- Measure rather than eyeball. We draw each word in the brand font twice in the browser, each time with a different backup font behind it. If the width changes, at least one letter is coming from the backup font.
- Check every weight the site uses. Each weight is a separate file.
- View the result on a phone and on Windows as well as a Mac, because each system substitutes a different font.
Fixing missing letters without changing the brand font
For Rōnin we kept the licensed typeface and did not edit its files, since commercial font licences generally do not allow that. Instead we used Montserrat, an open source typeface released under the SIL Open Font License 1.1. The Open Font License allows fonts to be used on websites and to be modified, and Montserrat’s letter heights sit very close to the brand font. We cut a subset holding only ten letters, Ā ā Ē ē Ī ī Ō ō Ū ū, in the four weights the site uses. Each file is about 1.2 KB.
Those files load under the same font name as the brand font, with a unicode-range rule that limits them to those ten characters. The browser uses the brand font for every other letter and the small file only for macron vowels. According to MDN’s unicode-range documentation, if a page uses no character in the range, the file is not downloaded at all. We then checked all four weights in a headless browser, and the chat window title and footer rendered correctly.
The same method covers an é in a café name or a Vietnamese surname. If the foundry sells an extended character set for your brand font, buying it is usually the cleaner long term answer. The open source patch is for when that version does not exist, or when the fix is needed this week.
Chinese text on a bilingual website
On an English and Chinese site the question changes. The brand font will never contain Chinese, so the job is to choose a Chinese typeface that sits comfortably beside it and name it in the font list, rather than letting each visitor’s device pick one. Noto Sans SC on Google Fonts is a common open licence choice for Simplified Chinese.
Because a full Chinese font is large, it should be subset into smaller WOFF2 files, with a font-display setting so text appears while the font loads. Those choices affect how quickly the page shows readable text, which feeds into the loading measures Google describes in its Core Web Vitals documentation. The rest of a bilingual setup, including hreflang and separate Chinese metadata, is covered in our guide to building an English and Chinese website, and our bilingual marketing team sets the Chinese type alongside the English brand from the first design.
Check the licence covers the website
A desktop font licence lets a designer install the font on their computer for logos and print. Serving the same font to every visitor of a website is a different use, and commercial foundries commonly sell it as a separate web licence. Converting desktop files into web format does not change what the licence allows. If your designer supplies the brand font, ask for the web licence in the business’s name and keep a copy with your brand guidelines, so the next developer knows what the site is allowed to load.
Open licence fonts are simpler. Fonts under the Open Font License, which covers most of Google Fonts, can be used on websites without a separate purchase.
We check character coverage and licences on every website we design and every restaurant website, where dish names are full of accents. If your current site shows mismatched letters, or you are about to add Chinese pages, send us the address and we will tell you which characters are falling back and what it takes to fix them.
Frequently asked questions
Why does one letter on my website look different from the rest?
Usually the web font file does not contain that letter, so the browser borrows it from another font on the visitor’s device. Accented and macron letters are the most common cases. Testing the word against the site’s web font files in every weight confirms it.
Can I use the font from my logo on my website?
Only if its licence covers web use. Many commercial fonts need a separate web licence from the desktop licence your designer bought. The logo itself is normally an image file, so it displays correctly whatever font the page text uses.
Do Chinese fonts slow down a website?
They can, because a Chinese font holds thousands of characters and a full file is large. Subset WOFF2 files with a font-display setting keep text visible while the font loads, so a bilingual page does not have to be slower than an English one.
