Do it right now. We’ll wait. Open your website and find a headline word with a Latvian diacritic: “aģentūra”, “ģimenēm”, “ķīmiskā”, “ļoti”, “ņemt”. Now look at that letter closely: is it just as bold, just as wide, with the same personality as the letters next to it? If so, congratulations: the rest of this will be pure entertainment. If the letter looks slightly foreign, you’ve just found a bug that goes unnoticed on websites for months. And it sits right in the headlines, in the largest type.
The ransom-note effect
Latvian needs 22 diacritic letters, and modern display fonts, the beautiful ones used for headlines and logos, surprisingly often omit exactly these four: ģ, ķ, ļ, ņ, the comma-below letters. The browser shows no error. It quietly borrows the missing letter from a fallback font.
The result reads like a ransom note, a word glued together from cuttings taken from different newspapers. For a brand it’s a suit with one wrong button: on paper, everything is in place, yet something is off, and people feel it without being able to say what. Worst of all, the bug travels: today no headline contains a ģ and everything looks perfect; tomorrow “Pakalpojumi ģimenēm” lands there, and nobody has read headlines letter by letter in years.
Why your designer didn’t catch it
Not out of negligence. Nobody types “ģimene” into a font store preview. They type “Almost before we knew it”. Presentation headlines tend to be “Portfolio” and “Kontakti”, and those look flawless.
And even the technical checks that should be honest answer “all good”: they measure whether the letter can be displayed, from any font at all, not whether it exists in yours. A check that can’t say “no” checks nothing. It only manufactures a feeling of safety, which is more dangerous than not knowing.
How we actually verify
The only place where the answer isn’t an interpretation is the font file itself: it contains a table recording which letters the file holds. We download exactly the files the page serves and read that table for all 22 letters, per weight, because bold is a different file with different contents. And the list always includes a control letter that must NOT be in the file: if the check reports that one as present too, the check is broken and very nearly fooled us.
Before we published this article, the fonts of our own site went through exactly this check. All 22 letters present. Otherwise this would be a very awkward article.
If the letter did turn out foreign
There are three honest ways out. Swap the font for one with the full Latvian set. Commission the missing glyphs. Yes, that’s a thing. Or at least decide consciously where a foreign letter is tolerable and where, in the logo, in large headlines, it absolutely isn’t. “Probably nobody will notice” is not a strategy; it’s embarrassment on a timer you can’t see.
And if after the thirty-second test you’re not sure what you saw, send us your site’s address. The check takes us a minute, and you’ll get a specific answer: which letters, in which weights, and how serious it is for your brand specifically. Free, since we run this check for every project of our own anyway.