Why do accented letters print as a question mark on my labels?

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Your product is called Hajerősítő Sampon in Shopify, it reads correctly on screen, and the label comes out of the printer saying Hajer?sít?. Nothing is wrong with your catalogue and nothing is wrong with your printer. The character got lost at the very last step, when the label was drawn, and it is worth fixing before the next roll because the label is what your customer reads.

Which letters break, and why

A PDF has a set of built-in fonts that need no embedding, and that is what a label template uses until you give it one of your own. Those fonts carry a character set called WinAnsi: the Western European accents live there, so é, ü, ñ, ç, å and ø all print correctly. Central and Eastern European letters do not. When the engine meets one it cannot draw, it prints a "?" in its place, keeps the rest of the label intact, and warns you.

Hungarian: ő and ű (the double acute, not the umlaut).
Polish: ł, ą, ę, ż, ź, ć, ń, ś.
Czech and Slovak: ř, ů, ě, č, ť, ď, ň. The š and ž of the same alphabet do print, which is why the fault can look random.
Turkish: ğ, ş, ı, and the dotted İ.
Romanian: ă, and ș and ț with the comma below.
Everything non-Latin, plus emoji and some typographic symbols: Greek, Cyrillic, Chinese, Japanese, Korean.

The trap is that these letters look correct everywhere else. Shopify shows them, the app shows them, your invoice shows them. Only the printed label falls back to a "?", and on a Hungarian word an ő is hard to tell apart from the ó and ö sitting next to it.

The fix: give the template a font that has the letter

LabelCraft ships a font that has all of these letters, and it is included on every plan. When the pre-flight check names a character it cannot print, the banner offers a button that switches your template to it in one press. You can also pick it yourself: open Templates, choose your template, and press Use the built-in extended font in the Brand font section. Save, print one label, check the letter.

Your own font still wins. If your template already carries a brand font you uploaded, LabelCraft leaves it exactly as it is rather than swapping your branding out to fix a letter: add the missing character to that font, or remove it to fall back on the built-in one. The upload route is still there, under the same Brand font control, for a TTF or OTF up to 256 KB.

LabelCraft tells you before the roll is spent

The pre-flight check runs before the print and names the exact characters and the exact products that would come out wrong, so you can fix the template rather than discover it on a printed roll. That check used to run only after the print. It now runs before, which is the whole point of a pre-flight.

On a Zebra, the answer is different

If you print native ZPL to a Zebra, the printer draws text with its own built-in font and never loads a font you upload, so a brand font cannot help there. Either rename the product, or print that template as a PDF with a brand font that has the character.

If your brand font is missing one letter

A different warning, missing glyph, means the opposite situation: your uploaded font is being used, and that particular letter is not in it. Display and decorative faces often ship a Western European set only. Upload a text face with wider coverage and the label is fixed.

Install free - 200 labels per month →

More guides: add your logo and brand font, label text too small or blurry, text cut off on the label - or contact LabelCraft support.