When will Spark use a font that supports many more glyphs?

Spark seems to use Unicode, but the font lacks many special characters.

In the Spark chat / text window, some characters display as an outline rectangle.

Please switch to a font that includes more glyphs.

Arial Unicode MS includes all of Unicode 2.0.0 but is now almost ten years old.

Segoe Symbol includes many glyphs, but Unicode is now at 8.0.

I don’t so much care about being about to CHANGE the font, but I’d sure like to to be able to see the characters on screen.

:zap:abcŒœŠšŸŽžƒˆ˜–—‘’‚“”„†‡•…‰‹›€™:zap:

Would it be necessary to support the Unicode emoji (and other) modifiers? Not absolutely.

Of course it is most important to preserve the bits even if the glyphs are wrong.

As Spark and all the other projects here are driven only by a few volunteers (some of them are not developers even), it will only happen when someone provide a patch for this. As far as i can tell, Spark is using “Dialog” font which comes in java.awt.font class, which is probably old as Spark is using old graphical API (Java Swing). Probably other fonts (not bundled with Java) can be used and there was a ticket for making fonts configurable. Though not sure it would solve the problem. But the patches are old and do not apply correctly to the current source. [SPARK-1150] Allow the font face, size, colour & attributes (bold, italic, underline, strikethrough) to be changed - Ign…

This seems a long overdue topic - “support” for Korean or Armenian or emoji all amount to the same thing, which I usually refer to as Unicode “coverage”.

I don’t personally care much if I can change to a different font for cosmetic reasons, but I’d sure like to see something other than a square block when I paste in characters.

I don’t have permission to create an “ISSUE” - could somebody please create an “ISSUE” for Unicode coverage?

I’ve already explained why many topics are overdue here. Lack of developers.

There are already a number of tickets related to this (mainly for Chinese language problems), e.g. [SPARK-1639] Chinese fonts are not shown correctly in various places - IgniteRealtime JIRA Though i agree that this is more a fundamental Unicode support problem, which is probably because of the default font used in various places of Spark. And i think it should be solved by implementing better default font. Having an option to change the font is handy, but users shouldn’t look for it to make their text readable. I have filed [SPARK-1886] Improve Unicode support - IgniteRealtime JIRA But as i’ve said, we need someone to provide patches.

Btw, the question in the forums is marked as Answered by the question’s author when he thinks he received a satisfying answer.