---
name: Tofu
slug: tofu
category: typography
status: published
created: 2026-08-21T00:00:00.000Z
modified: 2026-08-21T00:00:00.000Z
definition: The empty rectangle a font renders when it has no glyph for a
  character, named for the block of bean curd it resembles.
aliases:
  - name: notdef glyph
  - name: .notdef
  - name: missing glyph box
  - name: empty box character
  - name: replacement box
tags:
  - errors
  - fonts
  - i18n
relations:
  contrastWith:
    - emoji-presentation
    - fallback-font
    - glyph
  variantOf: []
  partOf: []
  seeAlso: []
implementations: []
sources:
  - title: Tofu (Words of Type)
    url: https://wiki.wordsoftype.com/en/entry/tofu
  - title: Notdef glyph (Wikipedia)
    url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Notdef_glyph
demo: inline
exhibit: false
useWhen: naming the empty box where a character should be
---

Tofu is the blank rectangle you get when a font is asked to draw a character it has no
shape for. The nickname is the resemblance to a block of bean curd, and it stuck hard
enough to name a typeface project: [Noto](https://fonts.google.com/noto) is short for
"no more tofu", and its stated goal is a glyph for every character Unicode encodes, in
every script, so that no reader anywhere meets a row of boxes where their language
should be.

Not every box means the same thing. The one the font draws itself is `.notdef`, glyph
zero, the shape every font file reserves for "I was asked for this and I have nothing";
most faces draw it as a plain rectangle, and a few draw nothing at all, which is worse,
because a character that fails silently is invisible until somebody counts. A box with
four tiny hexadecimal digits inside it is a last resort face telling you the codepoint
it could not set, which makes it the most useful box of the three. And U+FFFD, the
replacement character, is a different failure entirely: it is not a missing
[glyph](/glyph) but a run of bytes that was not valid text, put there by whatever
decoded the file, so it points at an encoding bug rather than at a font.

Tofu is what the end of a [font stack](/font-stack) looks like when it runs out. The
browser walks the families you listed, then the system's own
[fallback fonts](/fallback-font), and draws a box only when nothing on the machine
covers the character. Subsetting a [web font](/web-font) to the Latin range is the
most reliable way to manufacture one: the page looks immaculate until a user types
their own name. Emoji are the other common source, since a codepoint asking for emoji
presentation needs a colour emoji font present at all, and an
[icon font](/icon-font) shows the same rectangle when its file fails to load, except
that there the box stands in for a control nobody can now name.

What shipping tofu tells a reader is that their name, their language, or their script
was not in the room when the product was built. The fixes are unglamorous: keep a broad
fallback at the end of every stack, subset by the characters your users actually enter
rather than by the ones in your marketing copy, and test with text you did not write
yourself. A box in a screenshot is a bug report, not a rendering quirk.