iOS 13 not displaying Russian Ruble (₽) unicode symbol

Question

I'm having issues displaying the ₽ symbol on iOS 13.x.x. It seems to be working on on iOS12, but when I use a device that had 13 installed, the unicode character shows up as an empty square.

https://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/20bd/browsertest.htm

• Everything works fine on desktop
• iOS 12 renders the character properly
• iOS 13 renders empty square
• When I set the CSS font-family to only a few options ('system-ui' is one), the character displays properly

To compare these, opened an empty tab and only added the symbol to the body of the HTML. This issue persisted. Just to be clear, when I have no CSS or extra markup on the page, this issue is showing up. Has anyone run into this? Did Apple remove unicode characters from some of their fonts?

iOS12:

iOS13:

Answer 1

I've finished my research and I'd like to say that the issue is exclusively in iOS and WKWebView. After an update to 13 version, iOS stopped recognizing a Ruble symbol ₽ and, for example, Azerbaijani manat ₼ and Check Mark Unicode Character (\u{2713}) in certain font sets.

This issue affected thousands of web pages even huge brands. So just changing a font to specific ones solved the issue, but it's an workaround sure.

the same issues for iOS13: 1, 2

Answer 2

As a workaround you can wrap separately the ruble sign in a font containing it. Helvetica Neue - contains the ruble sign ans it's preinstalled IOS font. For PC users you can use your default font like fallback.

span.ruble-icon {
  font-family: "Helvetica Neue", sans-serif;
}

<span class="ruble-icon">₽</span>