How do I resolve missing characters in my unicode font?

Question

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?

score 32 · Answer 1 · answered Jan 21 '19 at 18:45

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.

answered Jan 21 '19 at 18:45

terdon

100,812

1

This fixed my problem with specific characters when ttf-ancient-fonts and symbola did not. – Jordan Mack Jan 08 '20 at 19:28
1

And for those on Fedora, this downloads massive amounts of fonts, to cover almost all missing Unicode characters: sudo dnf install google-noto-* – rimkashox May 02 '21 at 07:32
680MB uncompressed on Ubuntu 21.04, but it did contain my symbol of interest from Miscellaneous Symbols and Pictographs. – Ciro Santilli OurBigBook.com Jun 08 '21 at 16:44

score 17 · Accepted Answer · edited Feb 23 '16 at 22:40

17

Install package ttf-ancient-fonts.

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install ttf-ancient-fonts

edited Feb 23 '16 at 22:40

Mateo

8,104

answered Feb 21 '16 at 08:07

Robert

186

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 '21 at 14:22

score 5 · Answer 3 · answered Dec 24 '15 at 22:54

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: .

answered Dec 24 '15 at 22:54

Terence Eden

1,796

Or just sudo apt-get install fonts-symbola and then restart firefox ;) – rubo77 Aug 07 '16 at 22:27

score 4 · Answer 4 · answered Oct 02 '19 at 03:05

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).

answered Oct 02 '19 at 03:05

Alex Henry

51

This solved my issue with the character "". – calm-tedesco Sep 09 '23 at 11:29

score 1 · Answer 5 · answered Nov 22 '20 at 05:09

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.

answered Nov 22 '20 at 05:09

Puspam

833

score 0 · Answer 6 · answered Sep 29 '22 at 06:53

0

Gentium fonts should cover everything.

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

answered Sep 29 '22 at 06:53

Aaryan BHAGAT

138

score 0 · Answer 7 · answered Oct 25 '15 at 08:29

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=gucharmap

answered Oct 25 '15 at 08:29

Bernard Decock

476

1

How do I obtain the Supplementary Multilingual Plane in Ubuntu? – merlin2011 Oct 25 '15 at 20:28
on the console this would be gucharmap – rubo77 Aug 07 '16 at 22:30

How do I resolve missing characters in my unicode font?

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