[Lazarus] Rendering Issue Emoji for HTML List Items

[Juha Manninen]

On Mon, Oct 16, 2017 at 4:43 PM, Martok via Lazarus
<lazarus at lists.lazarus-ide.org> wrote:
> when I checked what HTML2TextRenderer uses to translate list items, I found that
> since rev 55743 it uses U+26AB MEDIUM BLACK CIRCLE ⚫ and U+26AA MEDIUM WHITE
> CIRCLE ⚪.

No. Since r55743 it uses one of the star emojis.
See in constructor THTML2TextRenderer.Create:
  fListItemMark:='✶ ';
  //fListItemMark:='✳ ';
  //fListItemMark:='✺ ';
  //fListItemMark:='⚫ ';
  //fListItemMark:='⚪ ';

I left the other potential choises in comments there for easy comparison.

> Could someone please test this on other widgetsets,

It is not related to widgetsets anyhow. It only depends on the font
your system uses.
I also had problems seeing Unicode emojis on Windows but never on Linux distros.
To my surprise some fellow Lazarus developers complained they don't
render properly in their Linux systems. That is why I changed the
title emoji from a small diamond (outside BMP) to a big diamond
(belongs to BMP). For some reason their fonts support it better.

  //fTitleMark:='🔹';     <-- this did not show in some people's system.
  //fTitleMark:='◆';
  //fTitleMark:='◇';
  fTitleMark:='◈';
  //fTitleMark:='◊';

The stars and circles mentioned earlier belong to BMP.

> so I have an idea whether/what/where to report this?

Report to your OS manufacturer / project.
In case of Windows: Microsoft.  Let's see how quickly they fix it.
In any case those widely used Unicode emojis really must be supported.
There is no excuse.

Juha