In the notifications sent by Rhythmbox, the artist’s name and track name are supposed to be in italic. Instead, the notification shows the <i> and </i> without actually parsing them.
Any ideas? Should I open an issue somewhere?
I think it’s a notifications problem, not a Rhythmbox problem, because I’ve seen the same with the low battery warning notifications. (I’m running 16.10.)
MATE uses mate-notification-daemon, which uses Github for tracking issues.
Hi @utybo,
have you installed any other fonts after your install, that might be the reason if you are lacking some?. 
You can install a bunch with the following terminal command (Ctrl + Alt + t):
sudo apt-get install ttf-mscorefonts-installer
This is not a font problem. The problem here is that the HTML content of the notification is not parsed, and stays as is, resulting in notifications like this for example :
Now playing <i>Nemesis</i> by <i>Rogue</i>
(if it was a font problem, HTML would have been parsed, but visual glitches would have appeared. This is not the case here.)
EDIT : Opened an issue on GitHub : https://github.com/mate-desktop/mate-notification-daemon/issues/118
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The MATE Notification simply isn’t designed to parse HTML. I’ve not known the MATE or the Ubuntu notifications daemon to ever show italics… so it could be there for notification daemons that do support it. (such as KDE, maybe?)
An alternate is to use Ubuntu's notification daemon, which doesn't show them.
sudo apt install notify-osd
Once installed, change which daemon is used by editing this file as root:
sudo pluma /usr/share/dbus-1/services/org.freedesktop.mate.Notifications.service
With the Exec line reading this instead (for 64-bit):
Exec=/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/notify-osd
(You can also customise it, see @tiox’s guide for more)
To use it right away, stop the existing daemon, then send a test notification:
killall mate-notification-daemon
notify-send "Test Title" "<i>This will show normally</i>"
Although, RhythmBox is just being awkward by adding HTML tags.
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It works in GNOME 3 (makes sense since Rhythmbox is designed for it?), and I think I’ve seen it work in Budgie too (can’t remember). Not sure if it is supported in KDE.
As @elcste noted, it seems to affect other applications too… This may be a de facto standard?
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I noticed this issue myself while using midori.
Formatting appears to be part of the GNOME desktop notification spec (v 1.2): https://developer.gnome.org/notification-spec/
Markup
Body text may contain markup. The markup is XML-based, and consists of a small subset of HTML along with a few additional tags.
The following tags should be supported by the notification server. Though it is optional, it is recommended. Notification servers that do not support these tags should filter them out.
<b> ... </b>Bold
<i> ... </i>Italic
<u> ... </u>Underline
<a href="..."> ... </a>Hyperlink
<img src="..." alt="..."/>Image
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Thanks for the info @chrstphrchvz, I updated the issue on GitHub with the link you provided. Now all we can do is wait for input from the MATE devs.
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I’m currently trying to see what happens with mate-notification-daemon 1.16.1, which hasn’t made it to Ubuntu MATE yet [Edit: I can no longer reproduce the issue with 1.16.1]. On Github, there’s already few issues and commits on trying to get formatting markup to work and discuss more of how gnome-notification-daemon had approached it: see issues #106, #111
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Notification servers that do not support these tags should filter them out.
This is exactly what Ubuntu’s notification daemon (notifyosd) currently does. 
Thanks for the info too!
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The issue seems to be solved in 1.16.1 (the issue on GitHub is now closed).
So, I guess we just have to wait.
Thanks everyone!
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