Bug summary

Per character font fallback (#20740) works great, except in tick labels.

Code for reproduction

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

# CMU fonts available here : https://www.1001fonts.com/download/cmu.zip
plt.rcParams["font.family"] = ["CMU Bright", "DejaVu Sans"]

s = "There are \u2212 \u00D7 in between!"
plt.figtext(0.18, 0.45, s)
plt.gcf().suptitle(s)
plt.gca().set_title(s)
plt.xscale("log")
plt.xlim(1e-2, 6e-2)
plt.show()

Actual outcome

In the tick labels, characters not covered by CMU Bright are rendered with a placeholder instead of falling back to DejaVu

Expected outcome

Tick labels should fall back to DejaVu for \u2212 (minus sign) and \u00D7 (times sign) as in the other text instances.

Additional information

It seems to happen only with tick labels, other instances of text rendering work as intended in #20740. I get the same outcome with both macosx and TkAgg backends

I get the following warnings:

Font 'default' does not have a glyph for '\u2212' [U+2212], substituting with a dummy symbol.
Font 'default' does not have a glyph for '\\times' [U+d7], substituting with a dummy symbol.

Operating system

macOS 14.3.1

Matplotlib Version

3.8.3

Matplotlib Backend

MacOSX

Python version

3.11.7

Jupyter version

No response

Installation

pip