using Apple system fonts in email and/or documents

William M. wrote:

If I wanted to be sure that any special characters that I used were translated properly, would I be better off using a more universally compatible font in emails? What would you suggest?

What kind of special characters are you thinking about? If some character is missing from a font, the system will just use another font which does have it. It could look a little different, but it will still be the same character and easily recognizable.

Fonts are categorized by type and style. Since San Francisco is a thin, sans-serif font, it would be substituted with something like Arial. This is standard procedure with software and happens at a system level, not an app level. So it should work everywhere.

William M. wrote:

If I wanted to be sure that any special characters that I used were translated properly, would I be better off using a more universally compatible font in emails? What would you suggest?

The more you over-think it, the more likely you are to come up with a novel solution that won't work.

Just write the e-mail and forget about it.

Agree with etresoft. You're overthinking it.

For starters, the San Francisco set is entirely unavailable to the user. The internal names begin with a period, and the default action of Unix is to hide anything that does.

Also as mentioned, it's pointless to try and be that selective with an email. No one cares what sans serif font you use. Just pick one. Arial, Helvetica, Avenir, Impact, etc.

And if the recipient has their email client set up to display all incoming emails as unformatted text, they won't see the font you choose anyway. It'll be whatever font they chose for plain text in their email client's settings.

Also, if you choose a font that isn't available on all/most systems, they also won't see the font you choose. I don't think Avenir is on a Windows system, so it will end up being replaced by the default font in their email settings.

As long as you're using a common font (found on both Macs and Windows computers), then the recipient will see the ½ character.

If you choose a font that is not common, then there's no telling what they'll see. Particularly if their fall-back font does not contain a ½ glyph.

Check to see if you can find what is causing this automatic substitution. In System Settings > Keyboard, click on the Text Replacements button. If there is a substitution listed for 1/2 to ½, remove it.

I did click the Edit button to see if turning the auto corrections on made any difference (I normally have all of them off). It didn't change anything. 1/2 remained as a non-fractional character.

If you're using an email client other than Mail, check in its settings to see if it has its own substitution settings.

William M. wrote:

I will often type fractions, like ½, and the computer will make it look like a fraction rather than using a slash between two numbers.

That's fine. You can continue to do that. It should work without any problem.

I wasn't sure if that was dependent upon the font or something else.

There are some non-standard fonts where that could cause a problem. But any font that comes with the Apple operating system will work fine. There as a recent question where someone was complaining that certain symbol-only fonts were working differently in modern versions of macOS. It took me a while to figure out what they were talking about. But the end result is that Apple has purposefully changed the behaviour so that you can now use these special characters with more confidence that they will work on the other end.

I know that I've had problems sharing Word documents when I use a non-standard font and send to to someone else. If the recipient doesn't have that same font on their computer, font substitution occurs which will often mess up the formatting.

It's always a good idea to avoid non-standard fonts. But if you must use one, in some cases, you can embed the font in the document. This (usually) happens automatically in some formats like PDF. You can configure Microsoft Word to do this in Word > Preferences > Save > Embed fonts in the file

I was trying to avoid the same thing happening in emails.

Mail doesn't have any facility for embedding fonts. As a general rule, the simpler the format of your e-mails, the more it will be appreciated.