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I am trying to paste a latin insular capital letter t (https://encrypted-tbn2.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcRfztxlipDzKUS0YjVKb0I2fHYJUTCZiwub5Cr5NAcAVvECsiwMZe-Oa9U) into a Word document - which is unicode character A786. My Word 2010 currently displays this as a box with a question mark inside it, or if I change the font to Arial Unicode MS, just a box. Is there a free way to import a single character or set of characters as a Word add-on or package? In response to another question somebody mentioned MS Office language packs, which unfortunately are no longer available at all for Office 2010 according to the MS website, so I hope that is not the only way.

Microsoft Word: Some Unicode Characters Will not Display in Any Font

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You'll need to use a font that actually supports the particular character. (And then, for other people to be able to see the character correctly, they'll need the same font or you'll need to convert to a format that embeds character glyphs (font embedding) such as PDF.)

Unicode is an interesting beast. It supports hundreds of thousands of characters and symbols, some rarely used or from dead languages. Because of the sheer number of characters, trying to make a font file that covers them all is considered by most to be a wasted effort so usually only the more commonly used characters are included. (Sometimes that's just latin characters, sometimes it includes other languages, and sometimes you get fancy stuff like emoji.)

I'm only aware of one font that tries to support all characters: Unifont. You'll probably want the Standard Unifont TTF download, a 12MB file. (You'll also need to manually install it. I think, in Windows, once you've downloaded it, you can right-click and select "Install".) This is a bitmap font which means it looks pixelated at larger sizes. I've checked and it supports the particular character you've asked about.

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  • @PatentWookiee Depending on how you're using the character, it may be better to paste an image of the character into your document. Then you don't need a special font, and neither do recipients of the document. There are obvious downsides--resizing or styling the surrounding text doesn't affect the image, you can't search for that character, etc., but it might be worth considering.
    – blm
    Dec 31, 2015 at 17:49
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The font Arial Unicode MS (at leat from Office 2007) does not contain the character \uA786. Use another font.

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