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Comment by jorvi | Hacker News Reader

> You suggest to get rid of the icons ? what if they can be disabled in the config, will that fix the issue for you ?

Yes.

In general, its a good idea to not rely on someone having installed nerdfonts / fonts with glyphs. Or at the very least offer fallback.

You can usually get pretty far by repurposing Unicode symbols.

For example, from Bamum:

  𖦤 Headphone
  𖦥 IEM
  𖤣 Mic
  ꚰ Warning
  𖥉 Bluetooth (had to get a little creative)

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That method isn't entirely reliable either: all come out at “question mark in a box” (Chrome, Edge) or “codepoint hex in box” (FF) on the old Win10 box that I'm currently trying to retire. The come out find on a similarly default Win11 setup.

While the issue here is Win10, it shows that the problem is client font sensitive so it might affect others too (perhaps those running old-but-still-supported Linux distro releases with default fonts).

> all come out at “question mark in a box” (Chrome, Edge) or “codepoint hex in box” (FF) on the old Win10 box that I'm currently trying to retire. The come out find on a similarly default Win11 setup.

This is pretty funny to me, because on plain ol' Firefox on NixOS everything looks just fine!

We've come pretty far from the days when things were randomly broken on Linux..

Firefox on Fedora 43 here, no joy, and indeed, randomly broken on Linux (too).

[edit] Okey, so installing the complete Google Noto Fonts family resolved this issue. But I still don't know if relying on a script with almost no font support is any better than what the OP did.

> In general, its a good idea to not rely on someone having installed nerdfonts / fonts with glyphs. Or at the very least offer fallback.

This bears emphasis; I sometimes use tools that try to use fancy fonts for icons, and it just gives me unreadable symbols because I don't have the font installed. And you might reasonably say, "just install the font package", but that only works if the font is packaged for my system, and I know what package it's in.

For Bluetooth, you could of course use one or both of the runes upon which the logo was based: ᛡᛒ

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