For several years moon symbols 1F311 to 1F317 have shown correctly as simple graphics. after a Win10 update a month or two ago they changed to ‘Emoji’ characters, which show as pockmarked disks. These don’t show well at all in calendars.
After a couple of days they miraculously changed back to simple shapes. Yesterday after another Win10 update they went back to emoji’s.
Can anyone tell me if there is a way to force them to display as simple graphics?
There are workarounds using other shapes but the graphics are of different sizes and do not align well.
I use the hex code plus Altx to enter the graphics.
The actual grapheme displayed for a Unicode character depends on the font used, so if Windows updates mess around with that… shrug, not much that can be done, other than using a different font maybe.
Thanks. I have tried numerous font types and they all display the emoji style character.
However, in Wordpad the symbols display as simple black and white discs with all font types, which leads me to think that the word processor has some control over it. Or there may be some way of forcing the emoji to appear in the simple black and white.
Ableword does the same, but neither it nor Wordpad can handle other features I need.
That’s because you use wrong font for them. The Arial that you chose has not those symbols; and actually rather few fonts have. But two of them exist on Windows 10: Segoe UI Symbol, and Segoe UI Emoji. Which font will be chosen for a missing character, depends on software; so if recently MS changed the Emoji font to be more “suitable” for LO substitution algorithm, this has the consequences you see.
Just select proper font explicitly for your symbols, and you are done.
But the Arial (and many others) now do show the ‘emoji’ symbols. I would be happy if they only showed the simple black&white version. I understand that fonts can choose to show almost anything it wants for a hex input. I do not understand in what way the fonts show the simple or ‘emoji’ versions.
Again: Arial (and many others) do not have the symbols. Just open LibreOffice Special Character dialog, and check (you may enter the char code in the dialog in a recent version). So, when you use Arial and enter the character absent in the font, you are asking “Hey, show me the symbol!” - and the program needs to lookup another font, in which the character is present. If more than one font in the system have it, than it might pick one or another. Use fonts wisely!
Thanks. That is very helpful, but raises a couple of questions:
How does the program (LO) decide which font family to take the symbol from? (or is it Windows that makes the decision?). Sometimes I get the simple blackandwhite symbol, sometimes the ‘emoji’.
Is there a quick way to find out which of the installed font families has the symbol? (it’s a bit too time consuming to go through every font family, looking for the symbol).
You can either (re)place the wanted glyph by using ‘insert’ and ‘special character’ but you will be ‘hunted’ by incompatible fonts in the future.
Or you can look for a specialized symbol font that contains what you need. Install that on your computer. Make sure your documents use this special font for symbols.
You can create your own font file with only those symbols you need. (Google for on and off line tools)
Hint: Store a copy of the used font file* in the folder(s) of your special documents. this way they are easy to send to others if you need to send the files.
*only if copyrights allow this of course.
Thanks for that. I have found a ‘moon phase’ font which does this, but it is awkward to use because it doesn’t use the unicode specified hex code. I will try and create my own font line and see how that goes. Perhaps there is some way of adding font symbols to existing font families.
Good idea to send a copy of the font file along with the document.