Emoji skin tones are rendered as missing characters

[Michael Terry]

U+1F3FB through U+1F3FF are not rendered in the messaging app. Instead the "empty rectangle" missing-character symbol is rendered.

These characters are the "EMOJI MODIFIER FITZPATRICK TYPE" characters. They are meant to indicate skin tone of the preceding emoji.

I know that on the messaging app, all emoji are currently rendered as black and white. I assume that is a design choice. In the case we given specific color information, we either could render the color as requested or ignore it. But in neither case should we show the "missing-character" symbol.

[Bill Filler (bfiller)]

@elleo
 Can we revisit using the colored Emoji's? I recall we were waiting for proper support to land in qt. regarding this bug perhaps there is a missing font that we need?

[Michael Sheldon (michael-sheldon)]

Bill - Yep, now would be a good time to look into this again as a bunch of patches recently landed in Qt 5.6 to fix support for image fonts, so we should give them a test and see if they implement everything we need, and if so we can look in to backporting them to 5.4

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[Andrea Bernabei (faenil)]

Hi Michael, can you give more details about the patches you're referring to?

so we can get backport them asap

[Michael Sheldon (michael-sheldon)]

I tested 5.6 recently and it's still not actually in a state where it correctly renders image fonts under Linux, from browsing the Qt bug reports it looks like this only works on certain platforms currently and then only when using the native font renderer rather than the Qt renderer; I'll do a bit more investigation then file a bug report with Qt to track this.

[Andrea Bernabei (faenil)]

@Michael: thanks for the info :)

can you please link to those bugs you found (i.e. the source that says it's working on other platforms with Qt) as well? so it's easier for other people to keep track of the different pieces

[Michael Sheldon (michael-sheldon)]

I've filed a Qt bug for this here: https://bugreports.qt.io/browse/QTBUG-53302

Here's a bug that was fixed to provide support for Apple colour fonts, but I believe that only works on Mac OS X with the native renderer: https://bugreports.qt.io/browse/QTBUG-45514