Some unicode chars render as tofu (boxes with hex codes)

[Frestein]

I confirm that...

• I searched the FAQ, issue tracker, discussions board, documentation, and wiki, and found nothing about my issue.

• I read the debugging guide and researched the issue to the best of my ability.

• My issue can be observed on the latest available commit of Doom.

• My issue can be observed on a stable release of Emacs (i.e. doesn't end in .50, .60, or .9*)

Describe your issue

Some unicode symbols render as tofu - little boxes with hex codes inside. Example: 𝙼 𝚝 𝙲 𝚠 𝙷.

No idea how to fix it - not a font issue (Maple Font is fine, foot terminal shows everything correctly). The weird thing: earlier it only happened sometimes (when first emacsclient frame opened in Hyprland's special workspace), but now it's constant.

Font config: https://github.com/Frestein/dotfiles/blob/main/dot_config/doom/config.org#fonts

Steps to reproduce

1. Open Emacs - via emacsclient or emacs.
2. Insert characters: 𝙼 𝚝 𝙲 𝚠 𝙷.
3. Observe tofu instead of actual glyphs.

System information

https://xi.pe/Wse7?h

Related

• [bug] Text in the echo arena doesn't use the correct font museoa/bqn-mode#68 (maybe)
• Initializing under daemon? rolandwalker/unicode-fonts#3 (maybe)

[hlissner]

Make sure the Symbola font is installed. It's Emacs' (hardcoded) fallback font.

Besides that, you have a lot of font configuration and unicode-fonts active (from :ui unicode). Try disabling the :ui unicode module. unicode-fonts has been more destructive than helpful, in my experience.

foot terminal shows everything correctly

Curious. TTY Emacs generally lacks multi-font support, so none of your font settings are likely in effect there (thus inheriting your terminal font config).

[Frestein]

Make sure the Symbola font is installed. It's Emacs' (hardcoded) fallback font.

Ok, I installed ttf-symbola right now. Strangely, according to my atuin history, I removed it 7 months ago, but the problem only started bothering me consistently about 2 weeks ago.

So far those specific symbols (𝙼 𝚝 𝙲 𝚠 𝙷) no longer show up as tofu. However, tofu still remains when I look in <leader> i u. Do you see all those Unicode chars rendered correctly on your end?

UPD: Useful for testing.
https://github.com/rolandwalker/unicode-fonts#testing

Besides that, you have a lot of font configuration and unicode-fonts active (from :ui unicode). Try disabling the :ui unicode module. unicode-fonts has been more destructive than helpful, in my experience.

I actually enabled and configured that module precisely because I was experiencing this problem, which I wrote about on Discord back in September 2025. That package was the only thing that helped me avoid tofu so often, and it also let me override the font used for certain types of emoji.

I can test later how things work without it.

foot terminal shows everything correctly

Curious. TTY Emacs generally lacks multi-font support, so none of your font settings are likely in effect there (thus inheriting your terminal font config).

Yes. I mentioned foot as an example not in the context of Emacs - I understand that the TUI inherits the terminal's font settings. I checked <leader> i u in a TUI emacsclient, and there is no tofu there. In foot I use the monospace font defined in my FontConfig configuration: base, emoji.

Am I correct that Emacs doesn't work very well (or at all) with FontConfig? I previously tried setting doom-font to monospace, and it doesn't seem like that worked correctly.

[Frestein]

Make sure the Symbola font is installed. It's Emacs' (hardcoded) fallback font.

Ok, I installed ttf-symbola right now. Strangely, according to my atuin history, I removed it 7 months ago, but the problem only started bothering me consistently about 2 weeks ago.

So far those specific symbols (𝙼 𝚝 𝙲 𝚠 𝙷) no longer show up as tofu. However, tofu still remains when I look in <leader> i u. Do you see all those Unicode chars rendered correctly on your end?

By the way, according to my FontConfig, Twemoji is used instead of Symbola. So it's strange that installing the package seemed to help...

<match target="pattern">
    <test qual="any" name="family"><string>Symbola</string></test>
    <edit name="family" mode="assign" binding="same"><string>Twemoji</string></edit>
</match>

Am I correct that Emacs doesn't work very well (or at all) with FontConfig?

Hmm?.. It seems that I removed Symbola right after these changes. So maybe it was working? A very strange bug…

[Frestein]

It seems Emacs doesn't work with FontConfig, or does so in a very limited way.

I improved the situation by adding more fonts to the system and listing them in doom-symbol-fallback-font-families (which is also used by unicode-fonts-fallback-font-list). The current setup should cover common Unicode symbols.

Perhaps the bug sometimes reproduced because unicode-fonts was being loaded incorrectly in some way. Maybe related? Doom already uses the hack described there, but perhaps the implementation sometimes fails.