For some reason, eink screens work significantly better for me when I have even the mildest of headaches, so my ereader has been an important accessibility device for me since it now means I can read something while I’m waiting for my painkillers to kick in. I currently use a Kobo Clara BW and aside from some weird hiccups that were likely related to my dying hard drive rather than the device, it’s been pretty good. But occasionally, both the fanfic I download from AO3 and the more modern novels I read on the device have emoji characters, and those weren’t displaying. In a lot of cases, they don’t show any indication that they were there.
I was reminded of this today while chatting with some fanfic people and decided it was time to try to fix it.
Step 1: install an emoji font on the device.
Kobo has a nice tutorial for this and it’s pretty straightforwards BUT it turns out that the default emoji font on my laptop (running fedora) is the Google Noto Color Emoji font which doesn’t work on my device. Won’t even show up as a font after I put it on the device.
Step 2: Find the right emoji font that actually works.
Thankfully, there exists a b&w version of this font and it’s free to download. I grabbed the “regular” one out of the zip file and installed it. Bam! Font exists on device.
Step 3: Set the font in the document
In theory, my Kobo has an option to add in “supplemental fonts” so it’ll try those if the main font doesn’t have the necessary characters. But that didn’t work at all, possibly because the font thinks it has the character and is displaying a blank in the epub file I tested? I really don’t know why except that it didn’t work.
Setting the emoji font as the main font for the document does work, though, and the emoji displays just fine. It’s… not a great font, though. Lots of giant spaces between words.
Step 4: ???
The internet has a bunch of random speculation like “epubs only support 1 font” (which seems unlikely but not actually impossible) so it might be best to merge the emoji into a font I actually like for reading.
It’s also possible that I could set up some automatic styling of my epubs in calibre that would make the fonts work better. Some people seemed to have ideas about that but a lot of it included styling each emoji and while I’m sure I can write a perl script for it I’m not convinced that’s the best choice. And, again, it requires me to know that there’s emoji in an epub before I transfer it to my device, which I don’t always know when I buy a book or grab a fanfic. I guess I could build a whole workflow to look for them, but it seems unlikely that’s what everyone else is doing? Surely I am not the only person who reads reasonably modern epubs with chat sections in them?
For now, I have the font on my device and can flip over to it to see if I can see an emoji if I think one is missing, then flip back when reading with weird spacing irritates me. Not the worst, since often I can tell when the narrative has a chat/texting section that might include emoji. But that doesn’t really help when it’s not obvious from context.
So… Not sure what my next step it, but that’s where I’m at and I’m going to give up and make some lunch. If anyone has found a good fix for this, I’d love to know!
