Comment by guessmyname | Hacker News Reader

Comment by guessmyname | Hacker News Reader

I expected this to be the solution for my broken Linux font experience. In Linux there is no support for Emoji and every time someone uses them in a website to display so semi-important idea I get frustrated because the only thing I see is a blank character or a rectangular border. I thought this service was something like "discover what this non-supported character actually is" more than "discover what is the meaning of this character".

I know about the existence of alternatives [1][2] but I wish there was native support for this trend in Linux. And yes, I know emoji is actually an old thing from Japan companies, but is still a young trend in terms of western usage.

I wonder how difficult would be to copy all those images from the Apple font and create a custom TTF so I can get the fancy colored symbols in my computer. Of course, distribution of that file would be against Apple's copyright (or maybe not, I don't know) but I don't care.

EDIT1: Actually this is what I was expecting to be; I forgot I had disabled JavaScript in my browser. Still would like to have an official font with Emoji support for Linux.

EDIT2: Thanks to gtk40 I found [3] now I can create my own font with those images.

[1] https://github.com/eosrei/emojione-color-font

[2] https://github.com/eosrei/twemoji-color-font

[3] http://emojipedia.org/apple/

Hi, I made those color SVGinOT emoji fonts.

There are four methods for implementing (multi)color in OpenType fonts:

* Apple's SBIX table - Embedded bitmaps, non-standard, used on OS X.

* Google's CBLC+CBDT - Embedded bitmaps, part of OpenType spec, used on Android.

* Microsoft's COLR+CPAL - Colored glyphs, part of OpenType spec, used in Windows.

* Adobe/Mozilla/W3C's SVG+CPAL - SVG in OpenType (SVGinOT), part of OpenType spec, works in Firefox/Thunderbird.

I chose to use SVGinOT because it is the only out-of-the-box option for color font support on Linux right now. I plan to make both CBLC+CBDT and SBIX versions in the future.

> I wish there was native support for this trend in Linux

There is an unmaintained patch for Cairo to support Google's bitmap CBDT+CBLC OpenType format.[1] It needs to be updated and completed for "official" Linux support.[2] Behdad has many other things to do, so please do not open an issue against that fork. Long term, I expect support for both CBDT+CBLC and SVGinOT.

> I wonder how difficult would be to copy all those images from the Apple font and create a custom TTF so I can get the fancy colored symbols in my computer.

It is possible to create a CBDT/CBLC version of the Apple Color Emoji font, but the font is, as you suspected, unlicensed[3].

[1]: https://github.com/behdad/cairo/tree/color-emoji

[2]: https://github.com/googlei18n/noto-emoji/issues/36

[3]: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/22337295/license-of-apple...

They render fine for me with Firefox on Arch Linux, although they are only black-and-white. Apparently the "Symbola" font is being used.

> I thought this service was something like "discover what this non-supported character actually is" more than "discover what is the meaning of this character".

I don't see how when the title starts "I couldn't figure out what an Emoji meant"

You are right, I spoke too fast.

If I could downvote my own comments I would do so.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com