Arch Linux

sequethin

Member

Registered: 2022-08-10

Posts: 2

[solved] emoji fonts are invisible since update

After I did a pacman -Syu and rebooted, emoji are only visible in certain contexts. I'm using KDE Plasma with X.

The ibus-ui-emojier-plasma utility was working before and now the emoji are there, but invisible to me. I know they're "there" because I can hover over them with my mouse and "select" them (i.e. it copies them to my clipboard) and I can paste them into apps that accept them, for example here is the fox emoji, copied from the emoji selector and pasted into this forum text box: ?

I cannot see the emoji in the selector, however, and no terminal I've tried will display them. I've tried konsole, gnome-terminal, and alacritty so far. I've been using emoji in my tmux status bar for years now without issue, and now I see blank space where the emoji are rendered. The emoji are there, again I can even copy and paste them into applications that are working, so for example if I copy and paste my tmux status bar I can paste it here:  ? Local ? 0 ❀ mutt ❀ ✿ 1 ❣ nvim ✿  (e.g this is tmux running locally with mutt in an inactive window 0 and nvim in the active window 1 - Oddly enough, I can see, for example, the "space invader" emoji in this text box, but it shows up as a ? in the post preview)

I just can't see the emoji in the terminal, for some reason. I've searched the arch and other forums and tried a few things that solved other folks' issues with noto-color-emoji but none of those solutions worked. The kfontview and other KDE font management utilities also do not show the emoji as visible.

Things I've tried:
- setting fallback fonts for fontconfig
- changing locale
- using Gnome instead of KDE/Plasma
- uninstalling the ttf-google-fonts-git package and installing noto-color-emoji separately
- pasting into various apps to see what works and what doesn't:
  Working: text entry boxes in firefox, vivaldi, slack, discord
  Not working: Dolphin, konsole, gnome-terminal, font management UI programs, evolution (mail/PIM), ...

Help would be appreciated! Thanks!

Last edited by sequethin (2022-08-14 18:15:30)

ezacaria

Member

Registered: 2007-12-10

Posts: 113

Re: [solved] emoji fonts are invisible since update

I had something similar, where Firefox was rendering a glyph correctly but chromium did not.
My guess is that a given browser may be able to use a web font instead of a local one.

My problem with chromium went away when I installed noto-fonts-emoji (as hinted in the wiki)
kcharselect, for example, now displays U+1F44D correctly.

But you already installed noto-color-emoji-fontconfig, which has noto-fonts-emoji as dependency

My only idea would be to try removing noto-color-emoji, installing noto-fonts-emoji again and run "fc-cache -vf" manually just in case.

sequethin

Member

Registered: 2022-08-10

Posts: 2

Re: [solved] emoji fonts are invisible since update

My only idea would be to try removing noto-color-emoji, installing noto-fonts-emoji again and run "fc-cache -vf" manually just in case.

Even though I had done all of this, I went and did it again based on your suggestion and now emoji are working in the viewer and in konsole, but not in gnome-terminal. You're my hero! I don't know why they don't work in gnome-terminal but I will happily use konsole (I was only using gnome-terminal because emoji weren't working in konsole at first, but they were working in gnome-terminal haha) ... I really wish I understood what changed between the time I tried all this and the time you suggested it, but I am grateful none the less. Thanks a ton!