The Ubuntu fonts should use Tux for U+1F427 🐧 PENGUIN

What will be the benefit of adding that one character to the Ubuntu fonts?

It will be problematic to add a single emoji character to this font family without completing the set. I’m thinking of the rendering problems caused by, e.g., DejaVu when somebody attempted to build a colored font for Linux, where DejaVu’s non-colored glyphs took precedence over the colored font: https://github.com/eosrei/emojione-color-font/issues/17 & https://github.com/eosrei/emojione-color-font/issues/42

For this reason, all emojis should be provided in the OS in a single, separate family. Otherwise people installing an emoji font will wonder why the penguin, from all the characters, is not consistent with the rest.

Color emoji are better than monochrome emoji, but monochrome emoji are better than no emoji at all, and some environments where the Ubuntu font is widely used — such as, for example, all current versions of Ubuntu — don’t ship with color emoji. In addition, many Unicode characters that previously were not officially categorized as emoji now are, and there is no guarantee the same won’t happen to other characters in future. For those two reasons, trying to solve the problem of monochrome fonts overriding emoji fonts by omitting emoji characters in individual monochrome fonts seems futile. A better solution would be to ensure that a color emoji font, when installed, overrides all other fonts by default.

None of that is a reason to include a penguin in the Ubuntu font. It’s just not a reason to *exclude* it. And I don’t see how “completing the set” would help in any way.

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.