emojis don't display despite emoji font provided

[Axlefublr]

termframe -o file.svg -- echo hellow!😢

I override the font family with:

[font]
family = [
  "Input Mono",
  "JetBrainsMono Nerd Font",
  "Twemoji",
]
size = 16

so, I provide it the font to use for the emoji; it just doesn't use it. that's considering that it does use the Input Mono font as expected
the issue happens even if I don't touch the default font family, unsurprisingly

and also, regardless of if I change the config or not, termframe allegedly cannot find any single character, despite displaying the text in Input Mono and overall working

[2025-09-15T08:32:55.738Z WARN  termframe::render::svg] font not found for character h  ('h')
[2025-09-15T08:32:55.738Z WARN  termframe::render::svg] font not found for character e  ('e')
[2025-09-15T08:32:55.738Z WARN  termframe::render::svg] font not found for character l  ('l')
[2025-09-15T08:32:55.738Z WARN  termframe::render::svg] font not found for character o  ('o')
[2025-09-15T08:32:55.738Z WARN  termframe::render::svg] font not found for character w  ('w')
[2025-09-15T08:32:55.738Z WARN  termframe::render::svg] font not found for character !  ('!')
[2025-09-15T08:32:55.738Z WARN  termframe::render::svg] font not found for character 😢  ('😢')

[Axlefublr]

ohhhhh wth
so whether it will be displayed as expected or not depends on the receiver of the svg 🤔 so since I have twemoji installed I see it, and you might not; my browser has twemoji working (which is why I can see it here in the issue), but apparently swayimg doesn't (which is why I didn't see it render corrrectly there, because of which I went ahead to create this issue

[Axlefublr]

a bit confused what's happening precisely, honestly. is the font embedded into the svg, or is it more of a “one of these fonts will be used if they are available for the user looking at this svg”?

[Axlefublr]

ahhhhh! I see.

[Axlefublr]

I guess this issue is resolved in a sense, but would love to hear some wisdom about how to make emojis work when using termframe

[pamburus]

Hi,

You have --embed-fonts true option for that.
However, to use it with your custom fonts, you must add the font to the configuration file and provide a URL to the font file.
Depending on the font format and the character set size, the file size can range be from a few kilobytes up to several megabytes. The WOFF2 format is recommended because it provides the best compression. However, web fonts usually consist of a set of files, each containing a small character set.

That said, I haven't tried it with emojis. As far as I understand, the font only contains vector glyphs without color information. Therefore, it can contain substitutes for emojis, but I doubt it can contain classic color emojis.

[pamburus]

Ok, after some searching I found this – Noto Color Emoji.
It looks like it's possible, but the full set of emojis in this font is split into 13 files. They're pretty big, even in WOFF2 format. The whole thing is about 25 MB in binary form. The file containing '😢' is almost 5 MB in base64 form (it is embedded in SVG in base64 encoding).

[pamburus]

You can use some font processing tools to split them into even smaller sets, and then they'll probably be usable without a lot of overhead.

[pamburus]

@Axlefublr
Did you run into any problems with emojis on any of your platforms?

[Axlefublr]

to use it with your custom fonts, you must add the font to the configuration file and provide a URL to the font file

I see! that makes sense 😌

[Axlefublr]

makes sense that the emoji font is so large actually :o

[Axlefublr]

run into any problems with emojis on any of your platforms

mainly, the emoji doesn't render when I open the svg in swayimg. in most other places, how the emoji looks will be skewed — since I have the twemoji font installed it probably will just display as twemoji; but the other people looking at the svg I sent them is a different question: I don't know how the emoji will look for them.
in my case at least, svg is inconsequential, compared to the output looking exactly how I want; so I will probably just render the svg into a png. will need to learn how to do that properly, so that it embeds how my fonts look and such