Installing headless chrome on Ubuntu.

install-chrome-headless.sh

#!/bin/bash
# from https://chromium.woolyss.com/
# and https://gist.github.com/addyosmani/5336747
# and https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/lkgr/headless/README.md
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install software-properties-common
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:canonical-chromium-builds/stage
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install chromium-browser 
chromium-browser --headless --no-sandbox http://example.org/

https://support.google.com/chrome/thread/5705492?hl=en

I have found a solution to the problem.

It appears that Chrome in headless mode needs specific fonts installed for non-Latin characters. While this can be solved of course by installing a multitude of fonts, it would be a headache to install fonts for websites that support a lot of languages.

Luckily there are modern font packs available that cover nearly all languages and scripts on earth. I have installed 3 font packs that now show non-Latin characters for a lot of languages. For India I installed a special font pack to cover all the languages and scripts in India. I also installed a special font pack that covers Chinese Simplified, Chinese Traditional, Japanese and Korean.

Here are the 3 font packs that solve the issue. From top to bottom, an Indian font pack, an international font pack and a font pack for China, Japan and Korea:

sudo apt-get install fonts-indic
sudo apt-get install fonts-noto
sudo apt-get install fonts-noto-cjk

Installing these font packs solves the problem. And it does so elegantly. The normal Latin fonts used in the website's code still work, however when characters for a particular language can't be found, then headless Chrome falls back on the newly installed font packs.