I have only seen the playdate glyphs for up/down/left/right being included in the default system font. Is there a way to let font drawing fall back to those glyphs when they are not available in the requested font?
Do you mean if using any font, that if the font doesn't have the glyphs for the Playdate icons, the system should still display them properly? Because I've only ever seen it display the � icon when a font is missing the Playdate glyph.
Ah yes, obviously! Once again, reading more carefully could have saved past-me some wasted time 
For some reason I assumed that character represented "empty," but it seems it's actually a placeholder for empty.
Sounds very plausible, but when trying this with Asheville Sans 14 bold, no character is drawn.
So, with the original font, I get the boxes that are mapped to �.
With the original font file from the sdk I get this:
If I remove line 295 from the fnt file,
I get this:
gfx.drawTextInRect("⬅️➡ challenge Ⓐ start", detailRect.x, detailRect.bottom , detailRect.width, 20, nil, "...", kTextAlignment.center, asheVilleFont)This is a duplicate of Using glyphs illustrated in "Designing for Playdate" - #7 by BleuLlama