Do you 🖤 your 💻?

May 14 2021 by Johannes Schlatow

Once in a while, I come across a website that uses unicode emoji for illustration. Github is one of these that uses such symbols in the sidebar of the notification view. However, if you do not have a font installed that contains the corresponding glyphs, you will only see those beautiful inexpressive boxes ⌷ (or even whitespace). This is the case for the falkon browser packaged for Sculpt. Yet, it is pretty easy to augment it with emoji support.

By default, the falkon browser is packaged with DejaVu Sans (provided by raw/qt5_dejavusans), which only contains very few emoji glyphs. To enjoy a fully-fledged browsing experience with Sculpt, it must be supplied with an emoji-capable font, either as the default font, or as a fallback font. This is done in nine easy steps. By the way, this trick is also applicable to other qt5 apps, e.g. qt5_textedit.

As a prequisite, you need a running virtual machine or another system with zip and tar capabilities.

In a first step, you download the latest raw/qt5_dejavusans e.g. from cproc's depot and untar the archive after verifying the signature. Note, that {yyyy-mm-dd} is a placeholder for the current version:

 gpg --verify {yyyy-mm-dd}.tar.xz.sig
 tar xvf {yyyy-mm-dd}.tar.xz
 cd {yyyy-mm-dd}/
 tar xvf {qt5_dejavusans.tar}

This will create qt/lib/fonts/DejaVuSans.ttf.

Second, download an emoji capable font (e.g. Google Noto) and put the ttf file into qt/lib/fonts/. This folder should now contains DejaVuSans.ttf (the default font) and you downloaded ttf as a fallback font.

Third, create a new tarball qt5_dejavusans.tar from the entire qt/ folder and make it available to your Sculpt system. If you are working in a virtual machine, place it in the shared folder. Otherwise, copy it to a USB stick.

 tar cavf /mnt/shared/qt5_dejavusans.tar qt/

Fourth, in your Sculpt system, you must deploy the default falkon package, which is available in cproc's depot. (If you are already using falkon, you can skip this step.)

 +
  -> Depot
     -> cproc
       -> Tools
         -> falkon

Fifth, you create a local copy of pkg/falkon and raw/qt5_dejavusans in the used file system:

 cd /usb-1-4.3/  # put in the name of the used file system
 mkdir -p depot/local/pkg
 mkdir -p depot/local/raw
 cp -r depot/cproc/pkg/falkon depot/local/pkg/
 cp -r depot/cproc/raw/qt5_dejavusans depot/local/raw/

Sixth, copy the qt5_dejavusans.tar from above into 'depot/local/raw/qt5_dejavusans/{yyyy-mm-dd}/.

Seventh, edit depot/local/pkg/falkon/{yyyy-mm-dd}/archives and change cproc/raw/qt5_dejavusans/{yyyy-mm-dd} into local/raw/qt5_dejavusans/{yyyy-mm-dd}.

Eighth, create an index file for your local depot and the current Sculpt version (e.g. depot/local/index/21.03) with the following content:

<index>

  <index name="Tools">
    <pkg path="local/pkg/falkon/{yyyy-mm-dd}" info="Falkon Browser with Emoji"/>
  </index>

</index>

Ninth and last, startup the falkon pkg from your local depot and open a test page with emoji (e.g. this article).