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The Bitcoin symbol was added to the Unicode standard as ₿ (U+20BF). This shows up as a placeholder (empty box) in texts for me. What do you have to do so it will be shown in text, e.g. in the browser?

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    How old is your Linux installation? Mine (Debian buster) shows the character properly. I can open gedit, type Ctrl-Shift-U 20bf space, and see the proper character.
    – VGR
    Aug 3, 2020 at 1:46
  • This machine is running Ubuntu 18.04
    – Murch
    Aug 3, 2020 at 4:32

1 Answer 1

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While the symbol was part of the Unicode 10.0 release, many fonts still don't have the symbol as part of their character set. You need to install a font that includes the symbol to make it show up.

One such font is GNU Unifont Glyphs. After installing the package unifont, the symbol shows up in the console and browser for me.


Corollary, many Linux distributions support inputting unicode symbols by typing CTRL+SHIFT+U, followed by the symbol's designation 20bf offset by a space or ENTER.

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    You will not get this issue with Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, where unifont is included by default. If you run into some display weirdness with the ùnifont` package, try apt-get install xfonts-unifont ttf-unifont these packages are supposed to display font in TrueType and PCF (bitmap) method.
    – ReneFroger
    Aug 3, 2020 at 22:09

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