How to get Ubuntu to display unicode supplementary characters?

Question

I have a standard desktop UI install of the latest Ubuntu distro and I'm trying to view this page: http://www.i18nguy.com/unicode/supplementary-test.html.

However none of the text display properly. I have tested this on Windows 8 and I can see them just fine.

My locale output is as follows:

LANG=en_US.UTF-8
LANGUAGE=
LC_CTYPE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_NUMERIC="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_TIME="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_COLLATE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MONETARY="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MESSAGES="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_PAPER="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_NAME="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_ADDRESS="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_TELEPHONE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MEASUREMENT="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_IDENTIFICATION="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_ALL=

I have also found the terminal also doesn't display many unicode characters.

Solution

The comment about the missing glyphs is correct.

I installed additional font packages, namely AR PL fonts Ukai & Uming:

sudo apt-get install fonts-arphic-uming fonts-arphic-ukai

and now I can get most (though not all) of the characters displayed correctly.

There maybe better font packages out there but that's the best answer I have come to the conclusion of at this time.

Comments

[Admin]

It's likely that the fonts you're using don't contain the necessary glyphs for the characters you want. You could try copying your font from Windows 8 and using it in Ubuntu.