[Solved] Font rendering issues, except in Firefox

SmallAndSimple · Today 13:31:56

Time for the newbie corner, since even after 10 years of using Arch every day, font issues for me devolve to installing packages until the issues go away. This does not spark joy, so I am asking for help this time.

I cannot show the actual name of the group due to reasons so all of these images are tiny. Sorry.

Straightforward issue: I have this teams channel, that has an emoji in it. Firefox agrees:

firefox

Chromium, however does not believe in Emoji:

chromium

Neither does Sway:

sway

So one starts googling. I can install noto-fonts-emoji, this will solve the issue for Chromium. But its not a dependency (optional or not) for Chromium, so now I randomly have this noto-fonts-emoji explicitly installed, which just is not the correct way to do things (if its a dependency of chromium it should not be explicitly installed). So there needs to be a better way. Going trough the dependencies of Sway and Chromium does not really help me. Sway wants a "ttf-font", which I have (ttf-dejavu). Chromium has a direct dependency on ttf-liberation, so that one is installed and apparently cannot render this particular emoji?

And Firefox can render this emoji, so my installation is definitely able to render it.

What is the right approach here? How do I debug and solve this?

Last edited by SmallAndSimple (Today 16:22:03)

V1del · Today 14:11:27

What actual font does firefox resolve to (developer tools can show you what fonts are being selected for a given element in the page)? Yes most "normal" ttf fonts do not have emojis in them, so you'd likely be interested into what firefox actually resolves and what chromium doesn't resolve to unless you have noto.

The actual reason for the underlying discrepancy will likely be the recent fontconfig update that changed how it tries to query font families and likely your "not noto emoji" font not properly setting the information font config is looking for whereas noto does. Though I'd expect that to be a problem with FF as well, but to rule that out a simple approach is to remove the /etc/fonts/conf.d/48-guessfamily.conf symlink. See https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=314142 and the threads linked therein for the rationales of this change.

SmallAndSimple · Today 14:48:31

Thanks for your reaction, that send me for a loop: Firefox uses

Adwaita Sans
Twemoji Mozilla

To render correctly. I then looked up Twemoji Mozilla, which I definitely did not install, it probably comes pre-packaged with Firefox.
This might also be the moment to mention that this is a very new install, not a regression: emoji have never worked on this install (except in Firefox).

Following the rabbit hole a little deeper: No application outside of Firefox can render emoji (Also foot and NVim, for example), there is just nothing installed that can render them.

This sort of brings me back to "why does nothing on my system depend on being able to render emoji?", but that question is a maybe a bit off, nothing in my system can render Japanese either. So it just seems like a choice from Arch to say "if you need to render a specific symbol set, install a package that can do it". I am not sure why that surprises me so much.

For now the conclusion seems to be that I need to install some font that can render emoji, and noto-fonts-emoji seems about as good as any. If @V1del (or someone else) agrees with these general statements, I will mark the topic solved.

seth · Today 15:35:07

Firefox resolving some webfont?

fc-list :charset=1F91D

SmallAndSimple · Today 15:45:45

I dont know what a webfont is.

fc-list :charset=1F91D

Has no output, unless I install noto-fonts-emoji.

Looking into it, are there even working non-aur alternatives to noto-font-emoji? I am working trough the list in https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Fonts# … nd_symbols, woff2-font-awesome does supply 1F91D, but Chromium and sway do not use it for some reason. I have a nerd font installed (ttf-dejavu-nerd), which does not supply the emoji. Then there are some AUR alternatives, and finally we have noto-fonts-emoji.

seth · Today 15:56:57

I somewhen picked up https://fonts.google.com/noto/specimen/Noto+Emoji and only the regular variant of that at ~830kB - that's enough emoji for me

SmallAndSimple · Today 16:12:13

And then you just put those in

~/.local/share/fonts/

? I guess that works aswell.

seth · Today 16:14:03

/usr/share/fonts/TTF/ for system-wide access, but yes - using a package manager is a good idea in general to keep track and updates of stuff, but I also didn't get any of my wallpapers from the arch repos (although most of them are actually safe for work )

Arch Linux

#1 Today 13:31:56

[Solved] Font rendering issues, except in Firefox

#2 Today 14:11:27

Re: [Solved] Font rendering issues, except in Firefox

#3 Today 14:48:31

Re: [Solved] Font rendering issues, except in Firefox

#4 Today 15:35:07

Re: [Solved] Font rendering issues, except in Firefox

#5 Today 15:45:45

Re: [Solved] Font rendering issues, except in Firefox

#6 Today 15:56:57

Re: [Solved] Font rendering issues, except in Firefox

#7 Today 16:12:13

Re: [Solved] Font rendering issues, except in Firefox

#8 Today 16:14:03

Re: [Solved] Font rendering issues, except in Firefox

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