Non-latin fonts don't display properly in notifications

marcos-morar · December 23, 2025, 4:42pm

Previously, notifications were handled by their respective qubes, and installing non-latin fonts in those qubes resolved the issue. But now that notifications have become centralized, do we need to install fonts in dom0?

alimirjamali · December 23, 2025, 4:53pm

Sadly by design the new notification daemon/agent eats & replaces a large subset of Unicode characters which are known for security issues (I can provide link to source if needed).

If showing notification with those characters is essential, the best bet would be deleting qubes-notification-aget from template(s) which should show such text like r4.2.x

marcos-morar · December 23, 2025, 5:09pm

Not essential, but having question mark style symbols instead of the actual Unicode characters looks ugly.

alimirjamali · December 23, 2025, 5:34pm

I personally agree. Currently it shows U+FFFD unicode character (�). I would have preferred question mark (?) or even a text suggestion the message contained unicode characters with security issues.

Or even better, I would have preferred this was configurable.

marcos-morar · December 23, 2025, 6:03pm

So the bottom line is, either we have to decentralize notifications again or put up with the ugly question-mark placeholders.

alimirjamali · December 23, 2025, 6:09pm

There is a 3rd way. Compiling notification proxy with filters removed for specific characters you need

It is here:

github.com/QubesOS/qubes-notification-proxy

src/lib.rs

main


      
          if validate_code_point(c.into()) || c == '\t' {
              counter += 1;
              c
          } else if c == '\n' {
              counter = 0;
              lines += 1;
              c
          } else if c == '\r' {
              if iter.peek() == Some(&'\n') {
                  continue;
              }
              counter = 0;
              lines += 1;
              '\n'
          } else {
              // This is U+FFFD REPLACEMENT CHARACTER
              counter += 1;
              '\u{FFFD}'
          },

marcos-morar · December 23, 2025, 6:47pm

It means no third option

alimirjamali · December 23, 2025, 6:53pm

Such an irony that the notification pop-up ate emoji.

But seriously talking, if you open an issue about this (to allow a subset of characters based on user config), I might work on it in long run. It could be done at notification proxy level (which is written in Rust)l or at libqubes-pure level (which is written in C language).

marcos-morar · December 24, 2025, 1:54pm

I’ve opened the issue: #10495