Poppler does not fall back on other fonts properly
Submitted by Niels Ole Salscheider
Assigned to poppler-bugs
Link to original bug (#104144)
Description
If poppler loads a font that does not contain the required glyphs it does not fall back on another font. Instead it does not render anything.
I have this fontconfig configuration to make sure that all emojis are from Noto Color Emoji:
<fontconfig>
<match target="pattern">
<edit name="family" mode="prepend_first">
<string>Noto Color Emoji</string>
</edit>
</match>
</fontconfig>
When I now open a PDF file that uses for example ArialMT, fontconfig first suggests a few NimbusSans variants. Poppler skips over these since they are .t1 fonts. The next font it finds is NotoColorEmoji.ttf which is loaded. But it does not contain any glyphs, only the emojis.
The right thing to do would be to fall back to the next font. But instead poppler stops here and does not render the text.