fonts-noto-color-emoji not making pretty emojis in google chrome

[gork skoal]

Google-Chrome and emoji's is being a weird headache. Something's causing it not to find the right font to make emoji's:
"[13743:1:0115/225907.016533:ERROR:child_process_sandbox_support_impl_linux.cc(79)] FontService unique font name matching request did not receive a response.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

Thank you for your bug report. Is the issue specific to chrome? it might be an issue with the browser rather than the font...

[gork skoal (gork.skoal)]

No it's definitely specific to some combination of chrome emoji's and that
fon't
You can replicate that with chrome on ubuntu 19.10
Have that font installed: many people with just that installed on Chrome
either don't get emoji's working, or if they do they're just outlines kind
of like old school clipart.
However if you install Segoe UI, Segoe UI Emoji, Some get full colors some
don't. ^_^

On Thu, Jan 16, 2020 at 7:40 AM Sebastien Bacher <email address hidden> wrote:

> Thank you for your bug report. Is the issue specific to chrome? it might
> be an issue with the browser rather than the font...
>
> ** Changed in: fonts-noto-color-emoji (Ubuntu)
> Status: New => Incomplete
>
> --
> You received this bug notification because you are subscribed to the bug
> report.
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1859926
>
> Title:
> fonts-noto-color-emoji not making pretty emojis in google chrome
>
> Status in fonts-noto-color-emoji package in Ubuntu:
> Incomplete
>
> Bug description:
> Google-Chrome and emoji's is being a weird headache. Something's causing
> it not to find the right font to make emoji's:
>
> "[13743:1:0115/225907.016533:ERROR:child_process_sandbox_support_impl_linux.cc(79)]
> FontService unique font name matching request did not receive a response.
>
> To manage notifications about this bug go to:
>
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/fonts-noto-color-emoji/+bug/1859926/+subscriptions
>

[joke2k (joke2k)]

Sometimes reinstalling the fonts-noto-color-emoji package fixes the bug until the reboot.

[Luca Casonato (lucacasonato)]

I have the same issue, even on a fresh install.

[BoQsc (boqsc)]

Ubuntu 19.10 here.

Happens to me as well, it is possible to temporary quick-fix by reinstalling the package. The problem comes back randomly after hours, days, weeks.

sudo apt-get install --reinstall fonts-noto-color-emoji

Link to the related stackoverflow thread proving that problem still persist: https://askubuntu.com/questions/1029661/18-04-color-emoji-not-showing-up-at-all-in-chrome-only-partially-in-firefox

[denshigomi (denshigomi)]

So far it seems a permanent workaround is to create a symlink to the noto color emoji files in the current user's ~/.fonts directory:
$ shopt -s dotglob; mkdir -p ~/.fonts/truetype/noto; ln -s /usr/share/fonts/truetype/noto/* ~/.fonts/truetype/noto

[Ovidiu Suciu (solazio)]

This also happens on 20.04

[fcole90 (fcole90)]

The issue seem to appear when multiple fonts can provide the emojis. What seems to me is that the noto-color-emojis are not necessarily the first in the list. I had for exaple other font-noto packages and they were hiding the color emojis. I removed all the others and now I can see the color ones again.

The fact that user fonts have priority over system fonts is the reason for why the previous workaround works. However, in order to fix this bug, we need to think first, what should be fixed?

Option 1: the issue is just that the user is unaware -> keep the current behaviour and eventually find a way to inform the user of what font has the highest priority to provide emojis, possibly at install time. (This should be possible, given that Chrome does this)

Option 2: the issue is the mechanism -> we could have some configuration for a default emoji-provider, and have it handled with update-alternatives, the same way one can set the vanilla or ubuntu or pop gdm theme.

[Pacho Ramos (pacho)]

I think this is the same as
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/fonts-noto-color-emoji/+bug/1770783

This was fixed in webkitgtk:
https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=191976

But still not solved in Chrom* and Firefox:
https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=908541#makechanges
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1509988

Also, fontconfig upstream discourages to use play with conf file as suggested
https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/fontconfig/fontconfig/issues/136

[Alberto Salvia Novella (es20490446e)]

Fix:
https://gitlab.com/es20490446e/noto-emoji-confs

[Daniel van Vugt (vanvugt)]

Should this issue remain open or can we say bug 1858636 is the main remaining issue in this area?

[Marian Rainer-Harbach (marianrh)]

Since this occurs in other, non-snap-based browsers as well (e.g., Firefox and Vivaldi), I think that this issue need to be handled separately from #1858636.

[Daniel van Vugt (vanvugt)]

Bug 1858636 is not actually about the issue occurring in snap-based browsers. It's about the issue occurring on any machine running snapd. It happens to me with Chrome, which is a deb.

[Daniel van Vugt (vanvugt)]

So I will mark this as a duplicate of bug 1858636 for now.