Manage your fontstacks
A fontstack is an ordered list consisting of a primary font and optional fallback font(s).
Fonts can only be set on symbol layer types. Set fonts from the Style tab of each symbol layer, under Text, in the Font input field. Each list of unique font pairings between primary and fallback font(s) will create a new fontstack.
Manage in Mapbox Studio
When your primary font has missing glyphs, the text will be rendered in the fallback font instead. The default fallback font set by Mapbox Studio is Arial Unicode MS Bold. Unicode fonts include more glyphs than conventional fonts, allowing for better multilingual coverage.
In Mapbox Studio you can manage fontstacks using Components or Layers. This section shows how to manage this example fontstack using either components and layers:
'Roboto Black', 'Arial Unicode MS Bold';
Components
In custom styles built with style components, you can set a fallback font using the Typography tab. For each component typography property, click the name of the property, scroll to the bottom of the panel, and click 1 font fallback to change your fallback font.
Layers
To manage fontstacks on individual layers in the Layers tab, click the name of the layer, click the Font property, and click 1 font fallback to change your fallback font.
Manage rendering time
The number of fontstacks paired with the density of text per zoom on your map can significantly slow down your map's load time, especially when using multilingual labels. This is because dense multilingual text, at any set zoom level, will increase rendering time.
Here are some tips to decrease your map's rendering time:
- Latin scripts can handle more fontstacks, while other scripts like Chinese or Hangul, can require loading dozens of glyph tiles per fontstack.
- Keeping labels sparse and spread across zoom levels allows for more fontstacks in your map style.
- For multilingual maps with dense labeling, consider using fewer fontstacks.
Manage offline download size
When using one of our mobile SDKs, you can often reduce the amount of space required to download an offline region dramatically by limiting the number of fontstacks in your style. To learn more about reducing offline download sizes, see our guide to offline maps.