Tvheadend

You need an emoji font installed to see the characters. They are images that represent the content/genre of the program.

Sorry about that. Please see issue #4594. That column is meant to show you characters that represent the programme, such as a heart for a romance film, or a baseball, etc. This is from the genre or the categories in your xmltv file.

Thanks for the screenshot. Unfortunately it seems a few Linux distributions don't install fonts with the characters we used.

Although we only use characters that were defined years ago (rather than ones added in the last couple of years) to give wide compatibility, it seems your font does not have them so it should fallback to another font to display them, but your system has no font at all so displays black boxes. Some other systems don't have a colour font so see the characters but only as black and white not colour. Do you have details on what font you are using?

We're having discussions about replacing the characters with images to avoid the issue, but it will take a little while. But seeing how bad it is for your font suggests that may be the way forward since I never expected a system to have no fonts with any of the characters, especially since I had read that these characters were now bundled with Firefox 50+.

But in the mean time, as Robert says, you can install a font that supports the characters on your client such as fonts-emojione, but I have heard that it may change your default font.

Google Chrome is my default browser by choice. Was able to add Chrome extension and see the emojione without having to mess around with default system fonts. Then removed the extension.

Will wait on the outcome of this since I really don't use this column and the subject is in discussion.

Thanks for the quick response.