31

I have tried Firefox and Chrome and on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, and there seems to be a sizeable chunk of Unicode characters that I cannot render.

Here is one example, and here is another example.

What is the best course of action to diagnose the root cause and fix the missing characters?

7 Answers 7

32

The most comprehensive font package I have found is font-noto. Installing this has always fixed whatever font-display issues I was having:

sudo apt install fonts-noto

Then, restart your browser and everything should work as expected.

3
17

Install package ttf-ancient-fonts.

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install ttf-ancient-fonts
1
  • 1
    Wow, this worked surprising well! My missing character was ⮡ (down-right arrow), and after installing this package, it just appeared in my Firefox tab where it was missing, without even reloading Firefox or the tab.
    – sylbru
    Mar 21, 2021 at 14:22
5

In order to see the missing characters, you need to install a font which contains them.

I've found that Symbola contains the best range of characters.

  • Download the zip file.
  • Install the two .ttf fonts - if you double click on then, you should see a font preview, click the "Install" button.

With the latest version (8.0.0) I'm able to see the dog symbol 🐕 and the slice of pizza symbol 🍕.

See: enter image description here.

1
  • Or just sudo apt-get install fonts-symbola and then restart firefox ;)
    – rubo77
    Aug 7, 2016 at 22:27
4

I managed to fix the unrecognized characters issue I was having on Linux by installing the following packages:

apt-get install xfonts-unifont ttf-unifont

(The above command assume a Debian system, for other distributions you may need to use another package manager and/or specific package names).

1
  • This solved my issue with the character "𠆢". Sep 9, 2023 at 11:29
1

For me, installing the fonts-noto-cjk, fonts-noto-color-emoji, fonts-noto-core, fonts-noto-extra, fonts-noto-mono and fonts-noto-ui-core installed the missing characters. Those fonts have a large unicode coverage.

0

I tried to view the characters on my computer (See signs and symbols). Enter the Unicode-code in the search-window. It looks that the symbols mentioned are not rendered yet (These characters are in the Supplementary Multilingual Plane). See also http://www.ltg.ed.ac.uk/~richard/unicode-sample-3-2.html.

File a bug in https://bugzilla.gnome.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=gucharmapenter image description here

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  • 1
    How do I obtain the Supplementary Multilingual Plane in Ubuntu?
    – merlin2011
    Oct 25, 2015 at 20:28
  • on the console this would be gucharmap
    – rubo77
    Aug 7, 2016 at 22:30
0

Gentium fonts should cover everything.

There are basically 2 main packages fonts-sil-gentium and fonts-sil-gentiumplus

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