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Gestures on Linux

Greetings,

I've been running VarAC on Linux Mint under Wine since before it was "supported" to do so, and it has worked well for me in general (in spite of the black TX text block, for which I found a work-around until that was fixed), *and* per the subject of this post the gestures have never worked for me. Of course, they work fine in Windows. I asked Irad what font was used, and have installed every emoticon font I can find in Wine, yet the gesture symbols do not display for me, even in the latest 6.6.13 version. I have verified that the symbols work properly in other Wine applications, and have even installed all those same fonts in Linux.

My question is: Do any of you who run VarAC in Linux have working gesture symbols? If so, what did you do to get them to work? If you did nothing specific to get them to work, but they "just worked" for you, please briefly describe what version of Linux you are running and what Wine installation process you used.

Thanks & 73,

-Joe-

K0OG

19 comments

Comments (19)

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k0og

Jan 16

Irad,

Yes, the Linux compatible mode box is checked, and I made sure the segoeuiemoji ttf font is installed in both Wine and Linux. This is confirmed by the fact that the symbols show up properly in the VarAC help box as shown.

73,

-Joe-

K0OG

k0og

Jan 16

Replying to

Irad,

No, emojis do not show up in the broadcast screen (with tabular view disabled or enabled), and as I remember they never have.

-Joe-

irad d

Jan 16

Replying to

ok. Do you mind sending me an email ?

Seems like the font I use for Linux does not work well in C# datagrids. they do work in regular TextBox. Both the Broadcast and new Datastream tabular are based on a Datagrid.

I will need to explore with you a few options so I would prbably send you some things to tests.

send me an email please. iradirad@gmail.com

k0og

Jan 21

Replying to

Irad,

I sent an email to you four days ago, but did not receive a reply. Did you receive it?

73,

-Joe-

K0OG

k0og

Jan 16

Thanks Irad!

73,

-Joe-

k0og

Jan 15

Irad,

We had this problem solved, and it worked well in previous versions of VarAC, but the last couple of versions, including the current 8.4.4 does not display emojis in the data stream pane, even though it does display them in the help screen:

In this instance, I typed "HIHI!" and sent it, yet it did not display, as it has in previous VarAC versions since you fixed it last year.

I'm running Linux Mint 21.2, Wine 8.0.2.

73,

-Joe-

K0OG

irad d

Jan 15

Replying to

I believe I know why. it is the new "Tabular" data stream format and I did not apply the same linux-based-font to that section. I will include a fix for that on the next version. Sorry for the inconvenient.

Irad

irad d

Jan 16

Replying to

Well I checked and actually I did include the code to handle it.

Just want to make sure - your "linux compatible mode" under settings is checked ?

k0og

Mar 30, 2023

Tom,

I'm glad you got it working. Irad did a good job of fixing the problem for us Linux/Wine users. Yes, you found the correct solution - drop the seguiemj.ttf in the .wine/drive_c/windows/Fonts directory and it should work fine. I also did "winetricks allfonts" just to cover all possible font needs.

By the way, if you drop the .ttf file in your Linux fonts directory, you should type the "fc-cache -fv" command in a Linux terminal window to rebuild the Linux font cache.

73,

-Joe-

K0OG

Tom Gwilym

Mar 30, 2023

Replying to

Thanks Joe. Yep, I did run the 'fc-cache -fv' command and it all seemed to fall into place. A while back I did try to upgrade to the latest VarAC, but had some problem (I forget what it was) and didn't work. The full reinstall of the Linux distro "Andy's Ham Radio Linux" worked and probably gave me a nice clean platform to try again. If you have a spare computer, you should give Andy's a try, I've been pretty happy with it. I've also run Jason KM4ACK's Build a Pi routine on it and gets a lot more useful stuff running. 73! Tom KA7VIK

Tom Gwilym

Mar 30, 2023

I'm having similar issues, but mine won't even start correctly and get this message. I've found the Segoe UI font in a .ttf and put in the ~/.font folder and also tried in the ~/.wine/drive_c/windows/Fonts folder also with no luck. The one I found is named - segoe-ui.ttf, but then not sure if that has the emogi images in there. Gene Ishikawa mentioned this as a reply to my question. "Hi, This is most likely caused by the Emoji fonts newly introduced in the latest version of VarAC. You can google and find how to install "Segoe UI Emoji" on wine. "

I was doing ok with the previous VarAC, but just got squares instead of Emojis, but a screw up on my Linux machine couldn't fix, so I just did a new image of "Andy's Ham Radio Linux" and started a clean attempt. I've also tried installing fonts with WineTricks, but it doesn't seem to have an option for custome fonts, but I could be doing something wrong there too!

What you guys are discussing sounds similar to my issue, so figured I'd drop in here and see if you figured anything out?

Thanks, 73 KA7VIK

Tom Gwilym

Mar 30, 2023

Replying to

Some more fooling around, I found the answer...

Download from here - https://www.mediafire.com/file/pitu7ljkpkvoexj/seguiemj.ttf/file

Copy into ~/.fonts and also ~/.wine/drive_c/windows/Fonts

It start up fine then.

Tom

irad d

Feb 04, 2023

Just sharing info about a specific gesture (TU!) which is the thank you Emoji 🙏

This is its code: 0x1F64F

The datastream font in use is : Microsoft Sans Serif.

I can do something is proven to be effective. If another font would solve this - I can make the "linux compatible mode" to change the font of the data stream to allow emojis.

Just dont know if that is indeed a font issue or how to test it except trying to use differet type of fonts to see if one will do the trick.

I dont know much about WINE but I asked ChatGPT about this... and it suggested this. dont know if it would work. but attaching it here:

-----

This issue may be due to the font rendering engine of WINE not supporting emojis correctly. A possible solution would be to install Microsoft's TrueType core fonts for the web, which includes the popular "Segoe UI Symbol" font that contains many emojis.

You can install these fonts by running the following commands in a terminal:

wget http://corefonts.sourceforge.net/msttcorefonts-2.0-1.spec
sudo apt-get install wine-stable cabextract
sudo rpm --import http://li.nux.ro/download/nux/RPM-GPG-KEY-nux.ro
sudo rpm -i msttcorefonts-2.0-1.spec

This should install the Microsoft TrueType core fonts and make them available to your C# app running on WINE. You may need to restart your app or WINE for the changes to take effect.

k0og

Feb 15, 2023

Replying to

Irad,

Thanks for the suggestion. I am running Linux Mint so the .rpm approach (for Fedora) won't work, but the corefonts Sourceforge page has a link to the .deb installer, appropriate for Mint. I had already installed in both Wine itself and the Linux system the "Segoe UI Symbol" TrueType font, but that didn't help. The MS core fonts were also previously installed, yet didn't solve the emoji display problem. I downloaded the .deb installer and re-installed the MS core fonts from it. The .deb installer is actually flagged as a down-revision of the otherwise-installed MS core fonts from the Mint/Ubuntu repository. However, unfortunately, neither version solves the problem.

Another thing I tried was to download all the .exe font installers from the corefonts Sourceforge page and run the .exe font installers in Wine. They all appeared to install successfully. However, this did not solve the problem either. NOTE: After I tried each approach, I rebooted the system and tried again.

Interestingly, if I create a Word document in Linux LibreOffice, then open it in Wine "wordview" application (allowing open of MS Word documents), and that Word document has "Segoe UI Emoji" symbols in it, they display correctly in both Linux (LibreOffice) and Wine wordview. Should you be referring to "Segoe UI Emoji" instead of "Segoe UI Symbol" font?

73,

-Joe-

irad d

Feb 16, 2023

Replying to

NP. Send me an email and I'll send you a verion to test that changes the font of the datastream and the broadcast sectrion to "Segoe UI Symbol" under "linux compatability mode"

k0og

Mar 02, 2023

Replying to

Irad,

I sent a private message using the "Contact" tool on the web site. 73,

-Joe- K0OG