Unicode characters don't display in minimal-template AppVM terminal

User Support General
1

Hi,

I am experiencing some weird discrepancy between VMs based on:

  • debian-12-xfce template (VM1)
  • debian-12-minimal + selected packages only (VM2)

Both templates have xfce4-terminal, fonts-hack, fonts-jetbrains-mono installed. xfce4-terminal is configured to use fonts-jetbrains-mono but the problem described below persists with any of the fonts.

In both VMs:

$ locale
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=

The problem:

Certain unicode characters don’t display correctly in VM2 but render as a square with the hex code inside it. For example, the clock symbol displays correctly in VM1 but as :watch: in VM2. Not sure how this will display in the forum, so here is a pseudo drawing too:

2

The forum is obviously buggy and did not display the whole message (posted by mail), so here it is:

The problem:

Certain unicode characters don’t display correctly in VM2 but render as a square with the hex code inside it. For example, the clock symbol displays correctly in VM1 but as :watch: in VM2. Not sure how this will display in the forum, so here is a pseudo drawing too:

 ---
|2 3|
|1 A|
 ---

I have been searching and searching but found no solution to this. Perhaps it is something simple but I just can’t fix it.

Any ideas?

3

I am not sure if this helps with your issue but I am using fonts-noto-color-emoji.

2 Likes
4

The XFCE template doesn’t have that one installed but renders the unicode characters fine.

5

@whoami

After some more digging, it turns out your reply is actually helpful.

What I learned: if one font doesn’t have a particular symbol, a fallback font may be used. Example:

fc-match :charset=231A
FreeSerif.otf: "FreeSerif" "Regular"

In your case, it is fonts-noto-color-emoji. In the case of the XFCE template it seems to be fonts-symbola.

So, installing such a font solves the problem.
Obviously, this is non-Qubes specific.

Thanks!

3 Likes