74

I've upgraded from 17.10 to 18.04 and was hoping to have better emoji support. The results are that Chrome (66) is still using the old black and white emoji font, and Firefox (59) is managing to show some color emoji but not others. I took some advice to install the font EmojiOne but that didn't seem to help 😓

Screenshots from the emoji demo page at http://eosrei.github.io/emojione-color-font/full-demo.html :

Chrome: enter image description here

Firefox: enter image description here

9 Answers 9

83

For anyone else having the problem, uninstalling and re-installing the font pack worked for me (Ubuntu 19.10)

$ sudo apt remove fonts-noto-color-emoji
$ sudo apt install fonts-noto-color-emoji

or just

$ sudo apt reinstall fonts-noto-color-emoji

Then restart Chrome.

Edit:

The problems comesback sometimes when Chrome gets an update, and then I have to re-install the font.

IDK if it helps but maybe copying the font into /usr/local/share/fonts will solve this for future updates:

sudo cp -r /usr/share/fonts/truetype/noto /usr/local/share/fonts/truetype/noto
13
  • 2
    thx guy! have to do this another time after a while. Don't know why this font package get "corrupted"...
    – Seboudry
    Dec 23, 2019 at 10:10
  • 7
    This solution does not work after Restart. Dec 29, 2019 at 7:45
  • 3
    when you restart the problem comes back again :(
    – Victor
    Jan 9, 2020 at 10:35
  • 1
    Well, it worked for me. Now, it'd be rather interesting to know why...
    – Mark Amery
    Jan 10, 2020 at 12:11
  • 3
    Reinstall and restart Chrome worked on an out-of-the-box 20.04 install. Bizarre, but it works!
    – nlawson
    May 16, 2020 at 19:49
55

I fixed it - I had to follow these instructions from 2016 😧 I had to create ~/.config/fontconfig/conf.d/01-emoji.conf with the following text:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE fontconfig SYSTEM "fonts.dtd">
<fontconfig>
  <alias>
    <family>serif</family>
    <prefer>
      <family>Noto Color Emoji</family>
    </prefer>
  </alias>
  <alias>
    <family>sans-serif</family>
    <prefer>
      <family>Noto Color Emoji</family>
    </prefer>
  </alias>
  <alias>
    <family>monospace</family>
    <prefer>
      <family>Noto Color Emoji</family>
    </prefer>
  </alias>
</fontconfig>

The bit in the original instructions about installing Noto font was unnecessary since it's installed as part of 18.04 by default.

Then run:

fc-cache -f -v

On the next restart, Chrome has color emoji.

6
  • -1, because of two reasons: 1) the local fontconfig isn't required any longer in 18.04. 2) "installing Noto font was unnecessary since it's installed as part of 18.04 by default" isn't universally true. I have a full KDE desktop installation and it wasn't installed at all. See also my answer.
    – gertvdijk
    Jul 25, 2018 at 15:00
  • 2
    Do you know if that's all true for upgradees too? I sensed that my problems might have had to do with being a 17.10 upgrade.
    – N3dst4
    Jul 25, 2018 at 15:08
  • 2
    I'm using Kubuntu 18.04 and after installing The Noto Fonts I still had the same problem. However, this did the trick for me. Unfortunately, I'm not sure if it was the config file or simply the call to "fc-cache" which caused the change. Maybe both were needed.
    – andypotter
    Oct 24, 2018 at 16:54
  • This fixed emoji in Chrome but unfortunately broke them in Anki. 😞 Ultimately I had to revert it altogether to avoid the side effects.
    – undercat
    Dec 21, 2018 at 10:14
  • This did not have any effect on Pop_OS 19.10.
    – mxk
    Jan 31, 2020 at 6:55
30

On Ubuntu 18.04+ you can now simply install a single package: fonts-noto-color-emoji. After that, restart Chrome and it will take effect. No need for creating a manual font configuration.

This package is supposed to be installed on the regular Ubuntu 18.04+ desktop flavor (on a 'Recommended' level of dependency - check for yourself with apt rdepends fonts-noto-color-emoji). Some other flavors like Kubuntu (KDE) don't have this by default and require you to install it manually.

3
  • 12
    This didn't work for me. I'm using Ubuntu 18.04 with Chrome v71 from Google's official repository. The other answer did do the trick.
    – undercat
    Dec 18, 2018 at 11:33
  • 3
    @undercatapplaudsMonica there are multiple other answers now.
    – kynan
    Jan 30, 2020 at 7:40
  • Which other answer? Mar 11, 2020 at 16:45
5

Don't use that demo page to test color emoji. That page only demonstrates the EmojiOne font which isn't installed by default in Ubuntu (although Firefox uses a variation of it).

Instead use https://unicode.org/emoji/charts/full-emoji-list.html

Look at the Browser column. In default Ubuntu, it should mostly match the Google column. (Except for the Browser column, all the other columns are just .png icons). When I tested today, the Google column is just a bit out of date as Google has made some changes to some of their emoji that haven't been incorporated into the website. (For instance, the hamburger has cheese on top of the burger.)

6
  • Fair enough, but this is not an answer to the original question - how to enable color emojis in Chrome.
    – gertvdijk
    Jul 25, 2018 at 14:58
  • @gertvdijk Color emoji does work in Google Chrome. What specific web site is causing you a problem? Jul 26, 2018 at 15:04
  • Ok, I see that you fixed your issue by installing fonts-noto-color-emoji. I tried to get every Ubuntu 18.04 LTS flavor to include that package by default, but the Lubuntu and Kubuntu developers didn't want it. Jul 26, 2018 at 15:05
  • @Jeremy_Bicha Yeah, on Kubuntu. But, my point was, your 'answer' is more of a comment to the other answer about the test page to use. It doesn't really answer the Q/OP.
    – gertvdijk
    Jul 26, 2018 at 21:23
  • 1
    Your link is misleading because it has a font-family CSS rule for the "Browser" column that includes specific fonts like "Noto Color Emoji". The majority of websites are not going to have that CSS rule. So for me emoji renders fine on your link with the fonts-noto-color-emoji package installed, until I disable that CSS rule then they don't. If I copy+paste some emoji from your link to gedit or a terminal window, some render fine and some don't (e.g. U+2603 ☃ doesn't work while U+26C4 ⛄ does). Sep 2, 2018 at 2:36
4

I use emoji.conf.

enter image description here

...............

12
  • 1
    this is the only solution that worked for me on 20.04. the installer didn't work though. i had to manually copy both files in /root/etc/fonts to my own /etc/fonts/. upon restarting chrome i finally had emojis. thanks!
    – rmanna
    May 30, 2020 at 13:51
  • Oh, what happens when you run the installer? May 30, 2020 at 16:31
  • very weird. i just ran your installer again to send you the error and it worked fine 🤷🏽‍♀️
    – rmanna
    Jun 1, 2020 at 4:16
  • Link updated, so now it works with any emoji font. Jun 1, 2020 at 11:01
  • 1
    Thanks bro for the information this really worked for me as i wanted just downloaded the project and run the install-uninstall.sh and the problem get solved Mar 29, 2021 at 15:18
3

It seems this problem can be caused by having multiple incompatible emoji fonts installed, and/or having wrong default font selected in Chrome.

  1. Make sure you have fonts-noto-color-emoji package installed.

    sudo apt install fonts-noto-color-emoji
    
  2. Create/Edit font config files as in @N3dst4's answer.

    • Note: While @N3dst4 put his config file in ~/.config/fontconfig/conf.d/01-emoji.conf, I put my in ~/.config/font-manager/local.conf because of how my system is set up.
    <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
    <!DOCTYPE fontconfig SYSTEM "fonts.dtd">
    <fontconfig>
      <alias>
        <family>serif</family>
        <prefer>
          <family>Noto Color Emoji</family>
        </prefer>
      </alias>
      <alias>
        <family>sans-serif</family>
        <prefer>
          <family>Noto Color Emoji</family>
        </prefer>
      </alias>
      <alias>
        <family>monospace</family>
        <prefer>
          <family>Noto Color Emoji</family>
        </prefer>
      </alias>
    </fontconfig>
    
  3. Set default fonts in Chrome to variations of "Noto".

  4. Rebuild font cache + restart chrome.

    fc-cache -f -v
    
  5. If emojis are still not displayed correctly see what fonts are used to render them with right click on emoji -> Inspect -> Computed -> Rendered Fonts and uninstall them.

    • Example: My emojis were rendered by font Twitter Color Emoji, so I needed to uninstall package fonts-twemoji-svginot.
    • You might not need to uninstall fonts if you play more with font config files, but I have not tested that.
    • Don't forget to rebuild font cache + restart chrome after uninstalling fonts.

BTW this also fixed Zalgo text for me.

1

None of the suggestions here solved my problem that Google Chrome on Ubuntu 18.04 would not show color emoji, no matter what I did 😞. Eventually I resolved my issue by running the following command:

$ sudo apt-get purge fonts-symbola ttf-ancient-fonts-symbola

After this I restarted Google Chrome and color emojis finally worked 🎉.

0

In my case, it is because multiple fonts provide the emoji. I have to remove fonts-emojione to make fonts-noto-color-emoji work.

Another potential font package may cause the conflict is font-noto.

Link to the related bug.

0
0

Solved by adding Emojis - Emoji Keyboard extension to Chrome.

Additionally, I checked that the Chromoji - Emojis for Google Chrome extension also works.

1st Note: Emojis appear everywhere on the page except for inputs and textarea.

2nd Note: Any of these extensions additionally give us the ability to search for emojis along with the possibility of copying them.

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