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Below are the test cases that should be run when fonts-noto-color-emoji or nototools are updated to new major releases in the development version of Ubuntu. These should also be run for all fonts-noto-color-emoji or nototools Stable Release Updates.

Impact for fonts-noto-color-emoji update

Ubuntu has included Google's color emoji font by default for years. Annually, the Unicode Consortium releases a new Unicode standard with new emoji. Internet communication platforms quickly adopt the new emoji and it's important that those emoji also work on the latest Ubuntu release.

Emojipedia provides a list of the emoji provided by this font.

Click the Show new link to see the new emoji. Click the changed link to see other changes that were made in this release. https://emojipedia.org/google/15.1/

Impact for nototools update

Ubuntu has included Google's color emoji font by default for years. Annually, the Unicode Consortium releases a new Unicode standard with new emoji. Internet communication platforms quickly adopt the new emoji and it's important that those emoji also work on the latest Ubuntu release.

Emojipedia provides a list of the emoji provided by this font.

Click the Show new link to see the new emoji. Click the changed link to see other changes that were made in this release. https://emojipedia.org/google/15.1/

To build the new version of the font, we need to build nototools first.

Test Case for Color Emoji Font

1. Install the new color emoji font.
2. Restart your computer then log back in.
3. Open the Characters app and verify that emoji are displayed correctly. The Characters app will likely not show the new emoji but you can verify the changed and unchanged emoji display correctly.

4. Open Firefox and visit https://emojipedia.org/emoji-15.1/ All the New Emoji should display correctly

5. Click the link for one of the new emoji. On the new page, click the link in "This is how the _ appears". On that page, click the button to copy the emoji.

6. Open Text Editor and paste the emoji. It should still display correctly.
7. Go back to the Firefox page showing all the new emoji. Click some of the composite emoji and verify that copying and pasting them to Text Editor also works correctly. The composite emoji are things like gender, skin tone, hair color, and other color changes. Also, the flags are composite emoji. Because these emoji are made up of multiple Unicode points connected with variation selector and zero width joiner Unicode points, it's important that the system recognizes they represent a single character.

8. Visit https://www.unicode.org/emoji/charts-15.1/full-emoji-list.html. The page may take a moment to load as it contains a lot of images. The Browser column should be complete and display well. The other columns are a snapshot of what the emoji look like in various fonts but the Browser column shows what is actually installed on your system.

Test Case for nototools

It may be required to update nototools to be able to build newer versions of Google's Noto Color Emoji font. The nototools package only provides a single binary in /usr/bin/ because the only thing nototools is used for in Debian or Ubuntu is building that font.

1. Build fonts-noto-color-emoji with the updated nototools. This should be the version of fonts-noto-color-emoji already in the distro series. Install and verify that the emoji look correct.

2. Because you are probably updating nototools to build a new version of the font, also build the new version of fonts-noto-color-emoji. Install and verify that the emoji look correct. Use the above "Test Case for Color Emoji Font" to complete this test.

nototools (and python3-nototools) is only a build dependency. It does not need to be installed on your system.

What Could Go Wrong (fonts-noto-color-emoji)

Sometimes there is an issue with the display of a particular font after the font has been updated. See LP: #2034986 for instance. Perhaps this is a bug with font caching. In this case, it is not believed that the color emoji font is used by GNOME Shell itself so a simple restart of any apps that use emoji should be enough to fix that issue.

This could technically be a User Interface Freeze change, but the new and changed emoji don't show in the Ubuntu docs or official screenshots. So there doesn't seem to be a need to notify the Docs team. There are no translations here so no need to notify the Translations team.

CategoryDesktopTestPlans