Accents, ligatures and special characters: typesetting multilingual menus correctly

A menu that prints Creme brulee, Jamon iberico and Gnocchi all'arrabbiata with a typewriter apostrophe tells every French, Spanish and Italian guest that nobody checked. Missing accents are the most common typographic defect I see on menus, and the reason is rarely carelessness: it is a chain of small technical failures between the keyboard, the font, the layout software and the PDF. This article walks through that chain and gives you a checklist for a menu in two, three or four languages where every glyph is correct.

Why accents disappear between the kitchen and the printer

The dish list starts as a text message from the chef, typed on a phone that autocorrected é to e. It is pasted into a spreadsheet, then into a design template whose display font only covers basic Latin letters. The software silently substitutes a fallback font for the missing glyphs, so ñ appears in a slightly different weight, or shows as a box. The PDF is exported without embedding the fallback and the printer's system replaces it again. Four steps, four chances to lose the letter.

The fix is to control the two points where a glyph can vanish: the source text must contain the correct character, and the font must contain a drawn glyph for it. Everything else follows.

Which characters a European menu actually needs

For French, Italian, Spanish and English together, the list is finite and worth checking font by font before you choose a typeface.

• French: é è ê ë à â ç î ï ô ù û ü œ, all in capitals too (É, À, Ç, Œ), plus the guillemets « » and the thin non-breaking space.
• Italian: à è é ì ò ù, capital È in particular, and the typographic apostrophe for all'aglio, d'oliva.
• Spanish: á é í ó ú ü ñ, inverted marks ¿ ¡, and capital Ñ and Á for headings.
• Shared: the euro sign €, the degree sign for 24° months of ageing, the multiplication sign × for 2 × 50 g, the en dash, real quotation marks and the ellipsis.
• Numerals: both lining and old-style figures if you plan to use them, and tabular widths for price columns.

Any professional font family covers these. Many free display and script fonts do not, or cover the lowercase accents but not the capitals, which is the trap: your dish names look fine until you set a heading in caps.

Testing a font in five minutes

Before you commit to a typeface, set a test line in every weight you will use and print it at 100 %: Œuf mollet, Crème brûlée, Jamón ibérico, Añojo, Caffè, Più, ¿Postre?, 12,50 €, 24 × 3. Set the same line in capitals. If any character switches to a different look, shows a box, or sits at the wrong height, the font is not usable as is. Check the euro sign especially: several older fonts draw a € that does not match the figures in weight or width.

Then look at the accents on capitals. Well-drawn fonts have flatter accents for capitals so they fit under the line above; poorly drawn ones reuse the lowercase accent and the É pokes into the previous line. Give caps headings with accents 10 to 15 % extra leading if the font behaves that way.

Ligatures: when to use them and when to switch them off

Standard ligatures (fi, fl, ffi) join letters that would otherwise collide, and in French, Spanish and English text they should stay on. The œ in bœuf and œuf is a different matter: it is not an optional ligature but a letter of the French alphabet, so it must be typed as œ, not as o followed by e. Some fonts lack it entirely, which rules them out for a French menu. In Italian the fi and fl ligatures are traditionally not used and can be turned off without any loss.

Discretionary ligatures (st, ct, Th) are decorative and belong to display sizes only. On a menu they suit the restaurant name and perhaps the section headings in an editorial style; switched on in the body text they draw attention to random words.

Apostrophes and quotation marks

The straight apostrophe is a typewriter compromise. Every menu should use the typographic apostrophe (the curly one), which most layout software inserts automatically but spreadsheets and phone keyboards do not. Do a find-and-replace on the final text. French quotations use guillemets with a non-breaking space inside; Italian and Spanish use guillemets or high quotes depending on house style; English uses high curly quotes. On a menu this matters mostly for a chef's note or a producer's quotation.

Spaces and punctuation that differ by language

French places a thin non-breaking space before a colon, a semicolon and the exclamation and question marks, and a non-breaking space before € (14 €). Italian and Spanish also place the euro sign after the number with a space; English places it before without one (€14). Spanish opens questions and exclamations with ¿ and ¡. If your layout software has language tags per text frame, use them: they drive hyphenation, the spacing rules and spell-checking, and they prevent English hyphenation from breaking an Italian word in the wrong place.

Decimal separators follow the language too: 12.50 in English, 12,50 in French, Italian and Spanish. A multilingual menu with a single shared price column has to choose one convention; the local one is right.

Keeping the glyphs alive in the PDF

1. Embed all fonts in the PDF (subset embedding is fine) so the printer never substitutes anything.
2. Export as PDF/X-1a or PDF/X-4, which require embedded fonts and flag missing ones.
3. Open the exported PDF on a machine that does not have your fonts installed and look at every accent; if it still looks right, it is embedded.
4. Do not convert text to outlines unless a printer explicitly asks; it removes searchability and slightly thickens small type.
5. Keep a plain text file of the final dish names with all accents as the single source of truth for the next reprint.

Correct in every language, or not at all

A menu in four languages promises four groups of guests that they are welcome. A missing accent breaks that promise for one group in a way they will notice and you will not. Choose a typeface that covers the full European Latin set in every weight, type the characters correctly at the source, tag each language, and embed the fonts. None of this costs money; all of it costs attention once.

In Menu Atelier the typefaces behind the eight styles are selected for full French, Italian, Spanish and English coverage, each language version of your menu uses the correct euro placement and decimal separator, and the exported PDF embeds every font, so the É in ENTRÉES and the Ñ in AÑOJO arrive at the printer exactly as you saw them in the 3D preview.