Jun 08
Having emoticons / emoji in Ubuntu Linux
Did you notice that anyone else on earth seems to have Emoji render correctly, for example the smileys and stuff people add to instagram or twitter posts, while you running trusty Linux have some garbled placeholder icon there? Something like this:
Well, I've tried two (actually three) solutions which are commonly presented online, and it only solved the situation half-way. So please comment if you know better.
I'm running Ubuntu 14.04 LTS here.
First stab:
An older post offered the solution of installing the "Symbola" font - available from the author's website - which immediately rendered web-content differently, but still wrong.
I had to manually delete the font (rm ~/.local/share/fonts/Symbola.ttf) as the nice GUI font-manager (sudo apt-get install font-manager) didn't display it (dunno why).
Second stab:
This post suggests installing the ancient-fonts package, so something called "unicode replacements" or so can kick in. So I fired up apt-get and installed ttf-ancient-fonts:
sudo apt-get install ttf-ancient-fonts
Only to find out that it is effectively the same as installing - I think - Symbola from the author's website, http://users.teilar.gr/~g1951d/ - the site's title is "Unicode Fonts for Ancient Scripts" so probably that's why the package is named like this although there's no "ancient.ttf" font in there...
Uninstalled that also. Most ideograms were wrong, as I saw it, and also they very really small!
Third stab:
On http://users.teilar.gr/~g1951d/ I've noticed a font called "Unidings", which I just tried for luck, and failed with again. Having it did not solve the problem.
We'll see if 16.04.01 will solve that out-of-the-box some way.