Element-web: Emotes / Emoji are no longer existent (Square character) or low-fi black and white after update to latest version.

Created on 29 May 2019 · 12Comments · Source: vector-im/element-web

Description

It used to be that every emoji was present and accounted for. What happened? Why am I missing most emoji, or they look like I'm a phone user for the few someone has bothered to support?

Steps to reproduce

Type a ":" then notice crappy support for emojis and broken characters. Notice that you used to have good support with colorful images.

broken-emotes

I expected support for colorful and existent emojis but I do not have pictures of it.

What gives?

Version information

Platform: Desktop (win 7)
OS: Windows
Version:
matrix-react-sdk version: <local>
riot-web version: 1.2.0
olm version: 3.1.0

bug p1 emoji

Source

unknown-user-9246102101

Most helpful comment

We'll fix this by shipping a fallback font.

ara4n on 30 May 2019

👍4

All 12 comments

I also experience the same behaviour on Debian stable, latest, also right after upgrading from 1.1.2 -> 1.2.0. The upgrade caused other issue as well, so I consider downgrading until fix.

hooger on 30 May 2019

Emoji current requires support for COLR fonts. If that doesn't exist, it will fall back to native emojis that might be installed. For Windows, that's Segoe UI Emoji. For Linux, that's Noto Color Emoji.

In the above screenshot, you are seeing what happens with no COLR support and no native emoji font either.

Can you open the Console (Ctrl-Shift-I), filter on "COLR", and see what messages are there?

jryans on 30 May 2019

It says

Checking for COLR support
Waiting for COLR SVG to load
Drawing canvas to detect COLR support
Canvas check reveald COLR is supported? false

so I guess, something is not installed. However

apt search noto |grep -i font

returns a list of results, all marked as installed. Can you help me fix the issue?

Results are: ("telepítve" means installed)

fonts-cabin/stable,stable,now 1.5-2 all [telepítve, automatikus]
  humanist sans serif font
fonts-noto/stable,stable,now 20161116-1 all [telepítve, automatikus]
  metapackage to pull in all Noto fonts
fonts-noto-cjk/stable,stable,now 1:1.004+repack2-2 all [telepítve, automatikus]
  "No Tofu" font families with large Unicode coverage (CJK)
fonts-noto-hinted/stable,stable,now 20161116-1 all [telepítve, automatikus]
  "No Tofu" font families with large Unicode coverage (hinted)
fonts-noto-mono/stable,stable,now 20161116-1 all [telepítve, automatikus]
  "No Tofu" monospaced font family with large Unicode coverage
fonts-noto-unhinted/stable,stable,now 20161116-1 all [telepítve, automatikus]
  "No Tofu" font families with large Unicode coverage (unhinted)
texlive-fonts-extra/stable,stable,now 2016.20170123-5 all [telepítve]
  TeX Live: Additional fonts

Thank you in advance!

hooger on 30 May 2019

On Debian, I guess you might want fonts-noto-color-emoji, but it doesn't appear to be available in stable. Perhaps the full fonts-noto package includes it? I am not sure.

According to this thread, it's possible you may also need updated libraries like fontconfig, cairo, etc.

jryans on 30 May 2019

I see the thread and I will try something when I have some more time, however the issue reamins: before the upgrade the emojis worked, now they don't. Is it possible that you changed to a newer version of the emoji libs? If yes, is it really necessarry to make strong requirements? I had no issues before, so I guess the current library versions are just fine.

hooger on 30 May 2019

We removed the previous Emoji font (Emojione) because of licensing restrictions that prevented us from upgrading to new versions and getting new images.

The new font we have included solves those licensing and character issues, but it also uses a newer font technology that currently requires up to date browsers, font libraries, etc.

jryans on 30 May 2019

👍1

Oh, that totally makes sense! Thank you for the clarification!

hooger on 30 May 2019

There are some more details about the emoji change in the Riot 1.2 blog post.

jryans on 30 May 2019

👍1

Losing emoji support on Debian Stable (please note this is the currently maintained stable release, not an "older release" as your blog post suggests) is somewhat disappointing. I'd rather have some slightly out-of-date emojis than the current extremely basic fallback. Is there no way to support both?