[Kobo] Unicode emoticons / emojis are not displayed

[Iridium]

I have a book with some emoticons / emojis, that display perfectly fine on PC and the Calibre viewer and editor, but when reading the book on Kobo Libra H2O are not shown.

I've already tried installing new fonts that supposedly support unicode symbols to kobo (Google's Noto font), and using it for that book, but it didn't fix anything.

This is a test string I came up to test it easily:

<p>Converted emojis: 1-🧐 2-😃 3-😅 4-😌 5-😏 6-😓 7-😔 8-😤 9-😬 10-😲</p>
  
<p>Using html codes: 1-&#x1F9D0; 2-&#x1F603; 3-&#x1F605; 4-&#x1F60C; 5-&#x1F60F; 6-&#x1F613; 7-&#x1F614; 8-&#x1F624; 9-&#x1F62C; 10-&#x1F632;</p>

Is there anything I can do, or does kobo simply not support this?

[theducks]

Did you link that font to a font-family (@fontface...) and the assign the Family to the span needed to enclose the character)?

@font-face {
   font-family: "noto";
   font-weight: normal;
   font-style: normal;
   src: url(../fonts/<filenamehere>.ttf);
}

1-<span class="usenoto">&#x1F9D0;</span>

[DNSB]

Were you trying to use the Noto Color Emoji font? That is not a standard font and has issues on a Kobo ereader. Using the Noto Emoji font worked for most of the glyphs other than the first one in your set.

[Iridium]

Originally Posted by theducks

Did you link that font to a font-family (@fontface...) and the assign the Family to the span needed to enclose the character)?

No, what I did was send the ebook with no embedded fonts whatsoever, but install these 3 fonts on the device on a new "fonts" folder:
- Noto Serif Regular
- Noto emoji
- Noto color emoji - (this one wasn't recognised, the rest installed fine)

Then when opening the ebook I changed the Font Face font to any of those two.

Meanwhile I now tried your method as well, embedding those two fonts in the ebook, and specifically using them for those glyphs. But unfortunately still no luck. They just appear as blank spaces.

[DNSB]

As I said, I added the Noto Emoji font as an embedded font and it worked. I also tried adding the Noto Emoji to the fonts directory on my Forma and it worked from there as well. I also tested a couple of other fonts that had emoji support and the results were pretty decent.

See attached image for Noto Emoji.

Most the work in creating the attached epub and embedding the font was done by Sigil.

[Iridium]

Originally Posted by DNSB

As I said, I added the Noto Emoji font as an embedded font and it worked. I also tried adding the Noto Emoji to the fonts directory on my Forma and it worked from there as well. I also tested a couple of other fonts that had emoji support and the results were pretty decent.

Thanks alot for taking the trouble to do this, with your epub I managed to figure out what I was doing wrong: your epub worked, as expected; my previous error was because I was doing

<span style="font-family:'Noto Emoji'">

..with STYLE in uppercase. Don't know how I missed that.

Anyway, glad it was just my stupid mistake and not some incompatibility problem, although changing font face on my Kobo Libra doesn't work when changing to Noto Emoji font: all text in the book just vanishes, which is odd.

With that said, just to be able to get ALL the emojis I wanted, I ended up adding inline SVGs to the book, which have the bonus of looking better, although the CSS dimensions took some work.

Thanks again to you both. Problem fixed now.