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?

Solution 1

Install package ttf-ancient-fonts.

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

Solution 2

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.

Solution 3

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: .

Solution 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).

Solution 5

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.

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Comments

[merlin2011]

How do I obtain the Supplementary Multilingual Plane in Ubuntu?

[rubo77]

Or just sudo apt-get install fonts-symbola and then restart firefox ;)

[rubo77]

on the console this would be gucharmap

[Jordan Mack]

This fixed my problem with specific characters when ttf-ancient-fonts and symbola did not.

[sylbru]

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.

[rimkashox]

And for those on Fedora, this downloads massive amounts of fonts, to cover almost all missing Unicode characters: sudo dnf install google-noto-*

[Ciro Santilli OurBigBook.com]

680MB uncompressed on Ubuntu 21.04, but it did contain my symbol of interest from Miscellaneous Symbols and Pictographs.