Font fallback mechanisms have more counterintuitive quirks than one might think. For example: I needed a few pictograms to mark land and sea access for some UI element. The obvious solution — using Unicode mountain and anchor glyphs — led to an interesting adventure. The font I use (DIN1451 for Latin), of course, lacked the needed glyphs. Not a problem, you might say: just add them to the font file and be done with it. Turns out it’s not that straightforward. While the mountain “letter” (U+26F0) worked fine, the font engine stubbornly refused to use my anchor (U+2693) glyph. The eventual solution was to move both glyphs from their standard codepoints (26F0 and 2693) to the so-called Private Use Area (U+Exxx). After that, the font engine started using whatever the font actually has.

Still not sure whether this is a Godot quirk, a system font engine quirk, or a Unicode nuance.

  • insomniac_lemon@lemmy.cafeEnglish
    4·
    13 hours ago

    Not-an-anything but tinkered with custom fonts a bit. I didn’t have any issue replacing a couple of (grayscale) glyphs (fire / U+1F525, and upwards arrow / U+2191 ). So I wonder if it’s something else for you.

    I did have an issue with double glyphs (and this gave an error too) but it was at higher ranges (with eye / U+1F441) and not even with a custom glyph.

    I don’t know if it makes a difference, but the fallback font I made with FontForge. Also I did a few normal letters, too:

    Low-poly, freeform text in 3 forms: 2D, Textmesh, and label3D. They each say "Look" with a single-color fire icon, though the label3D has an outline and the 2D text has stacked outlines/shadows which add color (also, a default eye emoji on the 2D text).

    Also (not shown), I made a color override script (e.g. turn the upwards arrow green) but that only works for 2D text (uses RichTextEffects, a bit clunky IMO). That, and also color emojis are a bit wonky too, only 2D and outlines a bit off but that may be a font issue.

    EDIT: Technically it wasn’t a fallback font because the letters are part of it. But I just tested it as one (with Cantarell as the SystemFont) and the fire glyph still works. Tried with your listed font too (FontVariation, though), so it must be an export or import issue with your glyphs (or some other setting issue).