Score:1

Emojis appear distorted on Ubuntu 20.04.3

in flag

I have a strange problem with emojis appearing distorted (stretched/enlarged on the X axis) in some applications. The problem does not happen in all applications, and in some applications, like web browser, emojis appear fine in the page content, but are shown distorted if they are part of the web page title.

Perhaps the most prominent example is in LibreOffice Writer:

emoji distortion in LibreOffice Writer

The thing is that I have 4 other computers running Ubuntu 20.04.3 and none of them exhibits this problem. All render the emojis correctly.

I have no idea how to troubleshoot this. I've compared the font configuration files in /etc/fonts/ and ~/.config/fontconfig/ and they're the same in all computers. I've even tried to reinstall all font packages, but still the problem remains.

How emojis are implemented is a bit of a mystery for me. All I know is that they come as part of some font sets, but that's about it.

If someone could point me to some documentation that details the implementation it would be great.

Thanks in advance.

Score:0
in flag

Doing some research I've discovered that both LibreOffice and Firefox depend on external fonts to render emojis.

So I compared the list of fonts on one of my computers where the emojis are rendered correctly versus the computer with the problem.

I found that the /usr/share/fonts/truetype/noto/NotoColorEmoji.ttf was absent in the computer with the problem.

That file belongs to the package: "fonts-noto-color-emoji" so a quick:

apt install fonts-noto-color-emoji

And the problem is now fixed.

However I would still love to understand what governs which font is used to render emojis and why, if someone could offer some insight or link to documentation it would be great.

mangohost

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