BitStream Vera : "99%+ of people will not notice the difference." about twemoji-color-font HOT 23 CLOSED

I have made a small change that allows the user (Ubuntu 18.04, gnome) to change the fonts and override the Vera default provided by this package and still benefit from the color emojis it provides (I use Source Sans Pro). The change is simply to load the 56-twemoji-color.conf font config file before the 50-user.conf file that load user preferences made by gnome-tweak-tool for example.

Commands I used as superuser:
cd /etc/fonts/conf.d
mv 56-twemoji-color.conf 46-twemoji-color.conf

Hope that helps and thanks for the twemoji-color-font package!

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Older... 😛 Current LTS 😆 (For the rest of the month!)

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For me the solution became simply removing/disabling the 56-ttf-twemoji-color.conf and then installing a patched DejaVu with no emoji-glyphs. (Twitter Color Emoji was already set in 45-generic.conf so did not need extra setup to add it)

I use Arch Linux and there was already an AUR package with the font.

The font is made with a simple fontforge python script...

cleaner.py:

from json import load
from sys import argv

ttf = fontforge.open(argv[1])
for emoji in load(open('emoji.json')):
    try:
        ttf.removeGlyph(int(emoji['unified'], 16))
    except ValueError:
        pass
ttf.generate(argv[1])

...that is fed a list of possible emoji-glyphs and then removes them from DejaVu.

for font in *.ttf; do fontforge -script cleaner.py $font; done

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Yes, I changed some fonts, but the default Gnome Desktop use what looks like Cantarell for that part of the interface, i don't even know how to change it

It doesn't actually bother me if there are some problems like this about fontconfig, but being better warned of this issue is important (without the "uninstall" script, i would have been unable to restore a decent-looking system).

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The "<1%" I refer to in that statement are the people who can recognize the difference between the glyphs DejaVu and Bitstream Vera. Anything else, such as this, is a font configuration problem.

Can you give me the output of this on your system?

$ fc-match sans -s | head -n4
Vera.ttf: "Bitstream Vera Sans" "Roman"
TwitterColorEmoji-SVGinOT.ttf: "Twitter Color Emoji" "Regular"
DejaVuSans.ttf: "DejaVu Sans" "Book"
DejaVuSans-Bold.ttf: "DejaVu Sans" "Bold"

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@Maestroschan I think the system fonts (e.g. Cantarell) are set with some sort of config files? Regardless, there is a GUI program called gnome-tweak-tool that can display/edit these settings.

Guide: https://www.maketecheasier.com/change-the-fonts-in-gnome3/

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@eosrei

~$ fc-match sans -s | head -n4
DejaVuSans.ttf: "DejaVu Sans" "Book"
DejaVuSans-Bold.ttf: "DejaVu Sans" "Bold"
DejaVuSans-Oblique.ttf: "DejaVu Sans" "Oblique"
DejaVuSans-BoldOblique.ttf: "DejaVu Sans" "Bold Oblique"

(i used the "uninstall" script and just installed the emoji font with the gnome utility from the .ttf file)

@DeeDeeG it seems like /usr/share/gnome-shell/theme/gnome-shell.css doesn't exist anymore. I do know Gnome Tweak Tool, but it is not the problem : Cantarell is "unset" (is this an actual word?) and there is Vera everywhere, which is kind of hard to revert without the provided "uninstall" script.

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Yes, unset is a word. Opposite of set.

The only thing the install script does is copy the font file and the custom font config: https://github.com/eosrei/twemoji-color-font/blob/master/linux/fontconfig/56-twemoji-color.conf.

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That's weird, the french equivalent of "set" doesn't have an actual opposite.

I did a little screencast https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W_jZKfsRX6s (there is a bug with terminix i hope you can read it) so you can see how the problem looks like, and how Tweak Tool is helpless and can't even understand what's going on.

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GNOME Shell hardcodes the Cantarell font in its default shell theme. This can be changed but most users and distros probably don't.

Ubuntu 17.10 uses the Ubuntu font instead of Cantarell unless a user opts in to the "vanilla GNOME" session or uses some other desktop.

@Maestroschan what Shell theme are you using?

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It is Debian 9 with the default shell theme

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Same here...

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This font config definitely breaks fonts in Firefox badly, starting with fonts on tabs and finishing with any fonts on websites.

Indeed, I didn't notice any difference after switching from default DejaVu to Bitstream Vera.

Here is how both Bitstream Vera or DejaVu look like:

And as soon as I install fonts-twemoji-svginot following happens:

You'll spot the difference even if know nothing about fonts.

This package also overrides explicitly configured fonts on websites, for instance, on duckduckgo.com I've configured theme to use Open Sans as primary font and here is what I've got:

Far from Open Sand, right? Other websites look terrible too.

Even more interesting is the fact that demo (https://eosrei.github.io/emojione-color-font/full-demo.html) still shows some of the emoji as black and white even with fonts-twemoji-svginot.

I've played with configs for a few hours and figured out a solution in #37. If other than default fonts are desired, ~/.config/fontconfig/fonts.conf can be created with contents like following:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<fontconfig>
  <alias binding="strong">
    <family>serif</family>
    <prefer><family>Twitter Color Emoji</family></prefer>
    <default><family>DejaVu Serif</family></default>
  </alias>
  <alias binding="strong">
    <family>sans-serif</family>
    <prefer><family>Twitter Color Emoji</family></prefer>
    <default><family>DejaVu Sans</family></default>
  </alias>
  <alias binding="strong">
    <family>monospace</family>
    <prefer><family>Twitter Color Emoji</family></prefer>
    <default><family>DejaVu Sans Mono</family></default>
  </alias>
</fontconfig>

Where DejaVu * fonts can be replaced with whatever you like more.

P.S. I'm on Ubuntu 18.04

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Hmm... yes lots of differences in the newer versions. I'm still seeing nearly everything work correctly in 16.04. I'll get a VM going of 18.04.

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I've just pushed more changes to mentioned PR, even fixed tests. Would be nice if you can test it on your older 16.04 if it doesn't break anything to you.

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• Font version: 1.4
• Operating system: Linux Mint 18.3
• Firefox version: 59.0.2

Before:

After:

I have just installed font from ppa.

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@Unnumbered, try #37 in case you don't use some applications like under Wine where it causes issues.
Also @eosrei, will you have time to split package into 2 like we've discussed there?

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FWIW, I also reacted about this statement because after installing this font my Firefox looked very different... Also on Debian (buster) with Firefox.

Before (Using Arial, from the ttf-mscorefonts-installer package - yes, I know Arial is not the same as DejaVu...):

After installing the package:

Here is the fc-match output without the package installed:

$ fc-match sans -s | head -n4
DejaVuSans.ttf: "DejaVu Sans" "Book"
DejaVuSans-Bold.ttf: "DejaVu Sans" "Bold"
DejaVuSans-Oblique.ttf: "DejaVu Sans" "Oblique"
DejaVuSans-BoldOblique.ttf: "DejaVu Sans" "Bold Oblique"

But, I think the reason here is that for some reason, Vera takes precedence even though Arial is installed. FWIW, the CSS rule in question looks like this here:

font-family: -apple-system,BlinkMacSystemFont,"Segoe UI",Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif,"Apple Color Emoji","Segoe UI Emoji","Segoe UI Symbol";

I tried changing this with the CSS inspector to some random value like "Comic Sans MS" but this made it display using "Bitstream Vera Serif" (???).

Uninstalled the package and now Comic Sans is displaying alright... There's clearly something fishy going on here.

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In case a GNOME Tweaks screenshot is needed to know which fonts are used, here it is :

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I had to uninstall this and reboot, because one website had become essentially unusable (sure, it was bad design on their part) and there didn't seem to be any way for me to make it use another font!?

Even when I overwrote the CSS with Firefox's dev tools, it would still use BitStream Vera Sans, which is apparently broken.

EDIT: To explain: The font was significantly wider than DejaVu Sans, which broke the layout of a roll20 character sheet.

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@kindfulkirby It's not actually Bitstream Vera at fault. It is the same. Try it in a document text editor. This is a failure of font rendering.

FWIW I leave this issue open so people with complaints can find it. I have no easy solution.

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May or may not be related, but as far as I can't tell I don't think I've noticed this problem anymore ever since I stopped using the .debs and started installing locally with install.sh instead.

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