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When I type "﷽ ", I usually see a very wide character. This applies to GTK 3 Gecko firefox-143.0 and GTK3 Electron (Chromium) VS Code 1.104.1-1758154183.el8. However, inside GTK 3 gnome-abrt-1.4.3 and Qt 6 kwrite-25.08.0, I see a significantly more compact symbol, instead.

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A Screenshot A Screenshot

To my knowledge, per my FontConfig configuration in kcm_fonts, I should always be utilising google-noto (via its monospace alias) for all text:

google-noto-fonts-common-20250301-1.fc42.noarch google-noto-sans-vf-fonts-20250301-1.fc42.noarch google-noto-sans-mono-vf-fonts-20250301-1.fc42.noarch google-noto-serif-vf-fonts-20250301-1.fc42.noarch google-noto-sans-devanagari-vf-fonts-20250301-1.fc42.noarch google-noto-sans-bengali-vf-fonts-20250301-1.fc42.noarch google-noto-sans-hebrew-vf-fonts-20250301-1.fc42.noarch google-noto-sans-gothic-fonts-20250301-1.fc42.noarch google-noto-sans-nko-fonts-20250301-1.fc42.noarch google-noto-sans-syriac-vf-fonts-20250301-1.fc42.noarch google-noto-naskh-arabic-vf-fonts-20250301-1.fc42.noarch google-noto-sans-arabic-vf-fonts-20250301-1.fc42.noarch google-noto-sans-armenian-vf-fonts-20250301-1.fc42.noarch google-noto-sans-canadian-aboriginal-vf-fonts-20250301-1.fc42.noarch google-noto-sans-cherokee-vf-fonts-20250301-1.fc42.noarch google-noto-sans-ethiopic-vf-fonts-20250301-1.fc42.noarch google-noto-sans-fonts-20250301-1.fc42.noarch google-noto-sans-georgian-vf-fonts-20250301-1.fc42.noarch google-noto-sans-gujarati-vf-fonts-20250301-1.fc42.noarch google-noto-sans-gurmukhi-vf-fonts-20250301-1.fc42.noarch google-noto-sans-kannada-vf-fonts-20250301-1.fc42.noarch google-noto-sans-khmer-vf-fonts-20250301-1.fc42.noarch google-noto-sans-lao-vf-fonts-20250301-1.fc42.noarch google-noto-sans-math-fonts-20250301-1.fc42.noarch google-noto-sans-meetei-mayek-vf-fonts-20250301-1.fc42.noarch google-noto-sans-mono-fonts-20250301-1.fc42.noarch google-noto-sans-ol-chiki-vf-fonts-20250301-1.fc42.noarch google-noto-sans-oriya-vf-fonts-20250301-1.fc42.noarch google-noto-sans-sinhala-vf-fonts-20250301-1.fc42.noarch google-noto-sans-symbols-2-fonts-20250301-1.fc42.noarch google-noto-sans-symbols-vf-fonts-20250301-1.fc42.noarch google-noto-sans-tamil-vf-fonts-20250301-1.fc42.noarch google-noto-sans-telugu-vf-fonts-20250301-1.fc42.noarch google-noto-sans-thaana-vf-fonts-20250301-1.fc42.noarch google-noto-sans-thai-vf-fonts-20250301-1.fc42.noarch google-noto-serif-armenian-vf-fonts-20250301-1.fc42.noarch google-noto-serif-bengali-vf-fonts-20250301-1.fc42.noarch google-noto-serif-devanagari-vf-fonts-20250301-1.fc42.noarch google-noto-serif-ethiopic-vf-fonts-20250301-1.fc42.noarch google-noto-serif-georgian-vf-fonts-20250301-1.fc42.noarch google-noto-serif-gujarati-vf-fonts-20250301-1.fc42.noarch google-noto-serif-gurmukhi-vf-fonts-20250301-1.fc42.noarch google-noto-serif-hebrew-vf-fonts-20250301-1.fc42.noarch google-noto-serif-kannada-vf-fonts-20250301-1.fc42.noarch google-noto-serif-khmer-vf-fonts-20250301-1.fc42.noarch google-noto-serif-lao-vf-fonts-20250301-1.fc42.noarch google-noto-serif-oriya-vf-fonts-20250301-1.fc42.noarch google-noto-serif-sinhala-vf-fonts-20250301-1.fc42.noarch google-noto-serif-tamil-vf-fonts-20250301-1.fc42.noarch google-noto-serif-telugu-vf-fonts-20250301-1.fc42.noarch google-noto-serif-thai-vf-fonts-20250301-1.fc42.noarch google-noto-sans-cjk-vf-fonts-2.004-9.fc42.noarch google-noto-sans-mono-cjk-vf-fonts-2.004-9.fc42.noarch google-noto-serif-cjk-vf-fonts-2.003-2.fc42.noarch google-noto-serif-fonts-20250301-1.fc42.noarch google-noto-emoji-fonts-20241008-2.fc42.noarch

Consequently, does my font renderer utilise some kind of heuristic to render a different symbol per character, depending upon available space?

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  • Maybe some additional relevant tags? Like OS, browser, etc. Commented Sep 25 at 13:44
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    Perhaps different apps use different libraries (or versions thereof) with different search orders for examining other fonts to find glyphs not present in the primary specified font. Commented Sep 25 at 14:22
  • @DougBreaux, would merely using Firefox as an example be sufficient for a tag? The question isn't about it, per se. Commented Sep 25 at 15:16
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    @RokeJulianLockhart I have Ubuntu Gnome not KDE so don't know if this applies: sudo apt install fontmatrix run it, select font, click the chart button below the menu, select view all mapped glyphs (or some Arabic set of interest) it will display all the relevant glyphs in the font. You can search by Unicode code-point or by Unicode glyph-name. There is also the xfd command in V11-utils and fc-list :charset=1234 etc Commented Sep 25 at 16:20
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    No, I just meant with a "linux" tag added (shrug) Commented Sep 27 at 16:05

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Per stackoverflow.com/revisions/20830300/9, I have confirmed that a fallback font was in use, presumably because my primary font doesn't include the relevant codepoint (U+FDFD). Consequently, whereas Gecko and Chromium utilise Noto Sans Arabic as a fallback, Qt and GTK must utilise another fallback resolution method that returns a different font.

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