2

Here are two cool and esoteric Unicode characters: ⌀ and ⎘. I'm trying to debug why these two characters aren't showing correctly in my ConEmu shell, which instead shows ugly rectangles with a question mark.

What is confusing to me is that when I paste these characters in Chrome, they show perfectly. I initially considered that maybe Chrome is using a better font than ConEmu which has more characters, but even when I set Chrome to use the same Consolas font as ConEmu, it shows the symbols correctly. In my anger, I even had Chrome render a sentence containing these symbols using the "Comic Sans MS" font, only to see that Chrome cheerfully continues to succeed in rendering these symbols.

What is Chrome's trick for rendering symbols correctly when the fonts don't define glyphs for them? Does it have some kind of fallback font that it uses? I'm hoping that whatever trick this is, I could use it in ConEmu as well.

Improve this question
3
  • Likely this: learn.microsoft.com/en-us/globalization/input/font-technology Commented Dec 30, 2022 at 0:15
  • It seems that Chrome's approach varies according to the OS; see RenderText and Chrome UI text drawing. On Windows (only) it uses font linking, as described in the link in the comment from @MarkTolonen above. Also see the video RenderingNG: The next-generation rendering architecture for Chrome, especially the Pipeline section @ 4:51, for an overview of how rendering works in Chrome. Commented Jan 1, 2023 at 0:44
  • If the font that's set through CSS doesn't have the glyph it falls back to the OS ones, which will at least have a "bogus" font (the one with the rectangles you talked about). The odd one isn't Chrome here, it's your ConEmu shell, why isn't it falling back to the OS fonts is weird. Commented Jan 1, 2023 at 13:14
Related questions
4
Why Do Some Specific Unicode Characters Not Render in Google Chrome?
2
Unicode character and browsers
5
How does chrome establish the right character-encoding?
Load 7 more related questions Show fewer related questions

0

Reset to default

Your Answer

By clicking “Post Your Answer”, you agree to our terms of service and acknowledge you have read our privacy policy.

Start asking to get answers

Find the answer to your question by asking.

Ask question

Explore related questions

See similar questions with these tags.