[SOLVED] Emojis not showing up in many cases after a recent update

elpres · 2025-06-03 12:29:23

A full system update about a month ago resulted in emojis not being displayed in many programs anymore. I'm using KDE, and if I paste an emoji into the address bar in Dolphin, or into Kate, or WezTerm, or Zed, they do show up as expected. If I start writing a new email in Thunderbird and paste an emoji into the "subject" field, it's not visible there but does appear in the title bar. Firefox doesn't show any emoji at all anymore, neither in the UI (I have some folders in the bookmark toolbar labelled with emojis to save space, and now the labels are just empty) nor on websites. I was able to discover that if I manually edit the font-family property of a style using the DevTools and add "Segoi UI Emoji" to it, they do appear, but with "Noto Color Emoji" (which is installed) no emojis are visible.

I have no idea how to debug this and would be grateful for any help.

Last edited by elpres (2025-06-03 15:59:51)

seth · 2025-06-03 14:23:49

Do you use any custom fontconfig … configuration files?
mozilla uses their own, much stricter, xml parser for those - maybe there's a syntax error that the libfontconfig parser lets slip but mozilla bails on?

elpres · 2025-06-03 15:37:05

This is what the contents of my /etc/fonts/conf.d looks like:

$ ls -l /etc/fonts/conf.d | grep -o '/usr/share/.*' | yay -Qo -
/usr/share/fontconfig/conf.default/10-hinting-slight.conf is owned by fontconfig 2:2.16.2-1
/usr/share/fontconfig/conf.avail/10-nerd-font-symbols.conf is owned by ttf-nerd-fonts-symbols-common 3.4.0-1
/usr/share/fontconfig/conf.default/10-scale-bitmap-fonts.conf is owned by fontconfig 2:2.16.2-1
/usr/share/fontconfig/conf.avail/10-sub-pixel-rgb.conf is owned by fontconfig 2:2.16.2-1
/usr/share/fontconfig/conf.default/10-symbols.conf is owned by awesome-terminal-fonts 1.1.0-5
/usr/share/fontconfig/conf.default/10-yes-antialias.conf is owned by fontconfig 2:2.16.2-1
/usr/share/fontconfig/conf.default/11-lcdfilter-default.conf is owned by fontconfig 2:2.16.2-1
/usr/share/fontconfig/conf.default/20-unhint-small-vera.conf is owned by fontconfig 2:2.16.2-1
/usr/share/fontconfig/conf.default/30-metric-aliases.conf is owned by fontconfig 2:2.16.2-1
/usr/share/fontconfig/conf.default/40-nonlatin.conf is owned by fontconfig 2:2.16.2-1
/usr/share/fontconfig/conf.default/45-generic.conf is owned by fontconfig 2:2.16.2-1
/usr/share/fontconfig/conf.default/45-latin.conf is owned by fontconfig 2:2.16.2-1
/usr/share/fontconfig/conf.default/46-noto-mono.conf is owned by noto-fonts 1:2025.06.01-1
/usr/share/fontconfig/conf.default/46-noto-sans.conf is owned by noto-fonts 1:2025.06.01-1
/usr/share/fontconfig/conf.default/46-noto-serif.conf is owned by noto-fonts 1:2025.06.01-1
/usr/share/fontconfig/conf.default/48-spacing.conf is owned by fontconfig 2:2.16.2-1
/usr/share/fontconfig/conf.default/49-sansserif.conf is owned by fontconfig 2:2.16.2-1
/usr/share/fontconfig/conf.default/50-user.conf is owned by fontconfig 2:2.16.2-1
/usr/share/fontconfig/conf.default/51-local.conf is owned by fontconfig 2:2.16.2-1
/usr/share/fontconfig/conf.default/60-generic.conf is owned by fontconfig 2:2.16.2-1
/usr/share/fontconfig/conf.default/60-latin.conf is owned by fontconfig 2:2.16.2-1
/usr/share/fontconfig/conf.default/65-fonts-persian.conf is owned by fontconfig 2:2.16.2-1
/usr/share/fontconfig/conf.default/65-nonlatin.conf is owned by fontconfig 2:2.16.2-1
/usr/share/fontconfig/conf.default/66-noto-mono.conf is owned by noto-fonts 1:2025.06.01-1
/usr/share/fontconfig/conf.default/66-noto-sans.conf is owned by noto-fonts 1:2025.06.01-1
/usr/share/fontconfig/conf.default/66-noto-serif.conf is owned by noto-fonts 1:2025.06.01-1
/usr/share/fontconfig/conf.default/69-unifont.conf is owned by fontconfig 2:2.16.2-1
/usr/share/fontconfig/conf.default/69-urw-bookman.conf is owned by gsfonts 20200910-4
/usr/share/fontconfig/conf.default/69-urw-c059.conf is owned by gsfonts 20200910-4
/usr/share/fontconfig/conf.default/69-urw-d050000l.conf is owned by gsfonts 20200910-4
/usr/share/fontconfig/conf.default/69-urw-fallback-backwards.conf is owned by gsfonts 20200910-4
/usr/share/fontconfig/conf.default/69-urw-fallback-generics.conf is owned by gsfonts 20200910-4
/usr/share/fontconfig/conf.default/69-urw-fallback-specifics.conf is owned by gsfonts 20200910-4
/usr/share/fontconfig/conf.default/69-urw-gothic.conf is owned by gsfonts 20200910-4
/usr/share/fontconfig/conf.default/69-urw-nimbus-mono-ps.conf is owned by gsfonts 20200910-4
/usr/share/fontconfig/conf.default/69-urw-nimbus-roman.conf is owned by gsfonts 20200910-4
/usr/share/fontconfig/conf.default/69-urw-nimbus-sans.conf is owned by gsfonts 20200910-4
/usr/share/fontconfig/conf.default/69-urw-p052.conf is owned by gsfonts 20200910-4
/usr/share/fontconfig/conf.default/69-urw-standard-symbols-ps.conf is owned by gsfonts 20200910-4
/usr/share/fontconfig/conf.default/69-urw-z003.conf is owned by gsfonts 20200910-4
/usr/share/fontconfig/conf.default/80-delicious.conf is owned by fontconfig 2:2.16.2-1
/usr/share/fontconfig/conf.default/90-synthetic.conf is owned by fontconfig 2:2.16.2-1

So all files seem to come from some installed package. Is there anything that looks obviously suspicious? Or should I just disable everything that's not from fontconfig? The files that contain (grep) "emoji" are 45-generic.conf and 60-generic.conf.

Last edited by elpres (2025-06-03 15:51:12)

seth · 2025-06-03 15:47:33

You're rather looking for local configs in ~/.config/fontconfig - it is unlikely that there's bogus upstream files, but I've seen personal configs using illegal comment syntax.

elpres · 2025-06-03 15:58:45

You're right! I had a file in there with this comment on top:

<!-- disable embedded bitmaps in fonts to fix Calibri, Cambria, etc. -->

...which would explain why the bitmaps disappeared If I remember correctly, I put it there a few years ago because otherwise these fonts would be rendered without any smoothing, so let's hope the situation improved since then...

Anyway, thank you very much for your help!

Last edited by elpres (2025-06-03 15:59:02)

Arch Linux

#1 2025-06-03 12:29:23

[SOLVED] Emojis not showing up in many cases after a recent update

#2 2025-06-03 14:23:49

Re: [SOLVED] Emojis not showing up in many cases after a recent update

#3 2025-06-03 15:37:05

Re: [SOLVED] Emojis not showing up in many cases after a recent update

#4 2025-06-03 15:47:33

Re: [SOLVED] Emojis not showing up in many cases after a recent update

#5 2025-06-03 15:58:45

Re: [SOLVED] Emojis not showing up in many cases after a recent update

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