GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 762890
cantarell doesn't provide support for recent emojis
Last modified: 2016-03-05 12:08:40 UTC
As noticed in bug 762830. It looks like cantarell (that is the default font installed in all Gnome setups) is missing fonts for covering emojis like: http://emojipedia.org/unicode-7.0/ Then, apps like gnome-characters, web browsers and others relying on them are not showing anything (or only some ugly squares as fallback). I am not sure if support for this fonts could be included in this set (or is there any other gnome font set that we are missing to package?) Thanks a lot :)
Yeah, there are no Emojis in the font and I actually don't know if there should be. Google, Microsoft and Apple all ship their Emojis as a separate font, and I'd like to shove this off to the artists team ;) That aside, do you expect color Emojis? Support for those is still spotty afaik, only monochrome ones work well across all toolkits and applications outside Windows and OS X. Take a look at Google's Noto Emoji: https://www.google.com/get/noto/#emoji-qaae.
Side-note: at the typeface BoF at last year's GUADEC, the consensus was that we don't have the manpower to make our own emoji font, so we should just use Noto.
That probably settles it. Maybe one day when there is more manpower.
Then... can you still clarify what additional fonts are "recommended" for Gnome desktop to point our users when they hit missing fonts? We are currently only depending on cantarell and, then, leading to this missing fonts issues and we having problems to know what fonts are providing the additional characters :( Thanks
Nirbheek mentions Noto. Google made the Noto Emoji and Noto Color Emoji fonts: https://www.google.com/get/noto/#emoji-qaae and https://www.google.com/get/noto/#emoji-qaae-color. Use those, preferably the former until GTK3 and others support color Emoji.
OK, I have seen there are still missing fonts there for some unicode characters (like U+1EEF0 for example)... but I guess I will have to report to them directly then ;)
Do you want to fill in *all* Unicode code points? I don't think that's useful. There are no all-encompassing font families except maybe fonts like Arial Unicode and Unifont, but their glyphs serve little more than to show how glyphs may look like. I'd focus on language support like the Noto fonts do.
Well, I pretend to know what font sets need to be installed for showing the fonts in browsers or gnome-characters as showing an empty space or the usual sign of missing font adds no information about how to get that character shown :(
Ah, so you're looking for fonts to use when that "Additional fonts need to be installed" thing is triggered? Have you looked at http://www.alanwood.net/unicode/fonts.html and http://users.teilar.gr/~g1951d/? I'd keep to the Noto fonts first if they support what you want somewhere, as they will probably fit best with Cantarell.
I will note that Symbola is already available in most (all?) distros. In Gentoo it's media-fonts/symbola (I'm guessing Pacho is using Gentoo).
Yes, I am thinking in pulling optionally the fonts for showing a lot of missing characters because, currently, when you open, for example, gnome-characters, you see a lot of missing fonts :/ Indeed, it looks like with noto, symbola and unifont, most of them are handled \o/ Thanks! :)