Proper way to debug fonts used in dunst

[The-Sound]

I've been having issues some time with some fonts missbehaving on dunst.

• A font glyph oriented not showing up for some emojis. This font was bitmap, but was converted to otb via fonttosfnt with default settings. The font works without any issue on other places like urxvt, although I'm aware that urxvt could be not using pango.
• Noto/google fonts, they won't scale properly to the font size established in the config.

So, to be fair, so this doesn't look like a rant crying "uuh just fix this". I know dunst is on a lower maintenance mode, I also realize that my package version is outdate with releases, although I didn't see any font related fix on the 2 last versions.

I also realize that the 2nd issue might be originated on me making the system to not scale bitmap fonts, but as far as I know, google/noto fonts are not bitmap and so they should be behaving correctly.

I've try my fair share of stuff to see the rendering order on the program, mostly through FC_DEBUG=n and starting dunst in the terminal with as much verbose output as possible, to see if pango was having any issue or missbehaving too.

So I would love to be pointed in the right direction to try to understand why the fonts are not behaving the way they should. Thank you.

• Version: Dunst - A customizable and lightweight notification-daemon 1.9.0 (2022-06-27)
• Install type: xbps package
• Window manager / Desktop environment: i3wm
• Distro: Void

font = tewi, IBM Plex Sans JP, Symbola 10
markup = full
format = "<b>%s</b>\n%b"