I've just spent the past hour grappling with getting FOP to render the Unicode glyph for a checkmark (U+2713) in PDF output from XSL:FO. I thought I'd share a few things I learnt along the way (that make me feel a bit silly for not knowing them already). The type of errors I was getting were: Some observations after messing around for far too long: Fop does not support fallback to a secondary font on a character-by-character basis.