Re: [Evolution] Emoticons appear in email subject line

[Milan Crha <mcrha redhat com>]

On Thu, 2020-04-02 at 20:07 +0100, Adam Hardy via evolution-list wrote:
> Emoticons in the subject are not displaying, neither in the folder
> list nor in the window header when the email is open. 

        Hi,
I suppose you mean the message list with the former and the message
preview with the later, right? The message list drawing is done by
gtk3/pango/cairo, the message preview is done by WebKitGTK+. The
WebKitGTK+ used to have problem to show emoji icons properly, they've
been black&white only, but it had been fixed some time ago. There are
bugs filled about that.

> This isn't happening in Thunderbird (so I know they're existing
> emoticons) but I searched around the settings and the internet and
> can't find any fix. 

Well, Thunderbird is a standalone application, while Evolution depends
on other system libraries (not only for drawing). I do not know
Thunderbird's drawing "engine" (it used to be gecko some time ago), but
it's surely much simpler to get newer Thunderbird than to get whole new
stack of libraries with Evolution.

> This is Evolution 3.28.5-0ubuntu0.18.04.1 and Linux Mint 19. 

Okay, so that's two years old software. Not much surprise it doesn't
know the emojis. Even the latest WebKitGTK+ doesn't draw the new
"composite" emoji icons properly.

If you've free time, disk space and bandwidth, I'd suggest to try the
latest Evolution (3.36.1, with the updated dependencies) from
Flathub.org. I believe it'll work properly, or at least better (+/-
"composite" emojis) there. Note it's only for testing, the Flatpak
version has its limitations, as it's an isolated sandbox, thus it may
or may not work well for you.
        Bye,
        Milan