Bug 463583

Summary:	Emoji characters not displayed
Product:	[Applications] NeoChat	Reporter:	Christopher Yeleighton <giecrilj>
Component:	General	Assignee:	Tobias Fella <fella>
Status:	RESOLVED NOT A BUG
Severity:	normal	CC:	carl, james.h.graham
Priority:	NOR
Version First Reported In:	unspecified
Target Milestone:	---
Platform:	openSUSE
OS:	Linux
Latest Commit:		Version Fixed In:
Sentry Crash Report:

Description Christopher Yeleighton 2022-12-29 10:10:34 UTC

SUMMARY
Emoji input panel allows you to select characters but most of them are not displayed.

STEPS TO REPRODUCE
1. Use the emoji input panel to enter the vomit emoji!

OBSERVED RESULT
default glyph

EXPECTED RESULT
vomit emoji

SOFTWARE/OS VERSIONS
Windows: 
macOS: 
Linux/KDE Plasma: openSUSE Tumbleweed 20221227
(available in About System)
KDE Plasma Version: 5.26.4
KDE Frameworks Version: 5.101.0
Qt Version: 5.15.7

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION

Comment 1 James Graham 2022-12-30 19:27:00 UTC

Hi do you have emoji fonts installed as Neochat will draw from whatever is setup on your system?

Comment 2 Christopher Yeleighton 2022-12-30 19:46:22 UTC

I installed EmojiOne Color and the default boxes are gone; the glyphs are still in black contour though (the ones in the emoji palette are colourful).

Comment 3 Christopher Yeleighton 2022-12-30 19:49:40 UTC

But I had Noto Color Emoji installed and it did not work at all.  Note that Noto Color Emoji, unlike EmojiOne Color, displays colourful glyphs in the character selector.

Comment 4 James Graham 2023-01-03 18:06:19 UTC

This black and white normally happens because of the way your distro configures (or doesn't) emoji fonts. I'm on arch and I had a similar thing, I had to configure the system to always use colour emoji fonts by setting up my font config correctly. Ultimately this is not an issue with Neochat but with your setup.

Comment 5 Christopher Yeleighton 2023-01-03 18:12:46 UTC

(In reply to James Graham from comment #4)
> This black and white normally happens because of the way your distro
> configures (or doesn't) emoji fonts. I'm on arch and I had a similar thing,
> I had to configure the system to always use colour emoji fonts by setting up
> my font config correctly. Ultimately this is not an issue with Neochat but
> with your setup.

Could you share your solution?

Comment 6 James Graham 2023-01-03 18:17:51 UTC

This is for arch not sure if it will work exactly the same on suse.

https://chrpaul.de/2019/07/Enable-colour-emoji-support-on-Manjaro-Linux.html

As noted I placed a conf file in ~/.config/fontconfig/ . Mine was slightly simpler than the one in that tutorial I actually stole it from the workaround we use for flatpaks.

<?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>

Comment 7 Christopher Yeleighton 2023-01-03 18:24:13 UTC

(In reply to James Graham from comment #6)

>   <alias>
>     <family>serif</family>
>     <prefer>
>       <family>Noto Color Emoji</family>
>     </prefer>
>   </alias>

This is not a solution, it is a work-around, and a dirty one on top of that.  You basically lie to the font configuration that Noto Emoji is a serif font.