THE BLANK SPACE IN A TEXT BOX WHEN A FONT IS MISSING. USUALLY DISPLAYED AS ‘☐’.
The term 'tofu' comes from its white, block-like shape, resembling a tofu cube.
It became a bigger issue as computers started handling more languages, especially with the rise of the internet and multilingual content.
In 2013, Google released the Noto typeface (short for "No Tofu") to fix this, ensuring all languages had proper character support.
Before that, you had to manually install language-specific fonts to display foreign characters, often resulting in flaws and inconsistencies.
Which, trust me, was even less fun to do than it sounds.
While modern systems use fallback fonts, tofu still appears when Unicode support is lacking.
